Beautiful boat but where are the buyers?

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Ex-SolentBoy

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A friend of mine is selling a stunning Aquastar 74. New spec is now over £2,000,000 and his broker said his has worth about £1,200,000. It is skipper maintained by an engineer and is now in many ways better than when it came out of the factory.

Anyway, he wanted a reasonably quick sale, as he has another boat in mind, so put it on the market for less than £1,000,000. Despite this there have been no serious buyers - just tire-kickers or whatever the nautical term is. It's not that people have viewed the boat and not liked it - there just seems to be so few buyers around.

Anyway, what could the reason for this be? Is the market dead around £1,000,000? I heard a pub rumour the other day that one of the UK's biggest motor boat builders was going to fold. Perhaps the market for newish stuff is feeling the recession, despite what we are told at boat shows.
 
How old is the boat? The big Aquastars do seem to depreciate heavily. Actually I plan to buy a boat exactly like that, if he can wait 14 years till my lad goes off to Uni :-)
 
Yes it's a beautiful boat but there are probably a couple of reasons why it hasn't sold. First, Aquastar is not a well known brand outside the UK so any foreign buyer seeing the ad would probably dismiss the boat because they don't know the brand so the market for this boat is probably only UK boaters. Second, this size of boat is more the size of boat found in the Med than the UK but the boat is located in the UK and, in any case, most Med buyers for 70ft boats would favour a more well known flashier brand and most buyers would also be put off by it's lack of speed.
So IMHO, the market for this boat is largely limited to UK buyers looking for a long range bluewater cruising 70ft mobo and the number of that type of buyer around at the moment must be very very few. Sadly, your mate would probably have been better off spending his money on a 70ft Fairline or Princess if he was concerned about easy resale
 
SolentBoy said:
I think that's gallons, not litres.
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Even 4.5g per hour doesn't sound right. At a cruise speed of 7-8kts, a 70ft mobo would be doing no more than 1 mpg so thats equivalent to 7-8g per hour. My guess is that the consumption is more like 4.5g per hour per engine at cruise speed
 
Deleted User said:
Sadly, your mate would probably have been better off spending his money on a 70ft Fairline or Princess if he was concerned about easy resale
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He wasn't that concerned, and may well still not be, hence pricing it less than half a new one. He did want a proper semi-displacement boat that was built like a brick whatsit - and that was what he got.

We have taken the boat to the med, including a frisky time across the Bay of Biscay and I am really glad it wasn't in something lighter. No disrespect to Fairlines or Princesses but I believe they displace about 40 tons all up are the Aquastar is more like 70 when full. It's just not the same sort of experience IMHO, and I have a sense that they attract very different types of buyers. Anyway, they should!

Thanks.
 
Deleted User said:
Even 4.5g per hour doesn't sound right. At a cruise speed of 7-8kts, a 70ft mobo would be doing no more than 1 mpg so thats equivalent to 7-8g per hour. My guess is that the consumption is more like 4.5g per hour per engine at cruise speed
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Your probably right. I have a suspicion though that anyone who has a million to spend on a boat, and the ability to run that sort of vessel, does not really care about fuel consumption!

Perhaps it was a deliberate typo to flush out the financially challenged?
 
I think as Mike says, the real problem is the location and the current struggle for this size of yacht. Actually in the med there is a lot of open minded buyers who look for quality before the name.
French, Italians, Greek, Swiss and Dutch are those who buy on that criteria.
Last thing a 74 feet MY of any brand takes an average of 2 years to sell, so don't accept to go fast with this.
 
SolentBoy said:
He wasn't that concerned, and may well still not be, hence pricing it less than half a new one. He did want a proper semi-displacement boat that was built like a brick whatsit - and that was what he got.

We have taken the boat to the med, including a frisky time across the Bay of Biscay and I am really glad it wasn't in something lighter. No disrespect to Fairlines or Princesses but I believe they displace about 40 tons all up are the Aquastar is more like 70 when full. It's just not the same sort of experience IMHO, and I have a sense that they attract very different types of buyers. Anyway, they should!

Thanks.
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Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely boat and I would take a Aq74 over the equivalent length FairPrinSeeker any day if I was in the market for this type of boat. In fact SWMBO and I looked over one at the last Soton show and she was so bowled over by it that she virtually ordered me to earn enough dough to buy one. In fact if your mate wants to hang on to his for another 3-5yrs, I might just buy it off him:)
It's going to appeal to the experienced boater who wants to go places. Unfortunately, most buyers of 70 footers just want something flash and whizzy which they can show off in the nearest anchorage
 
If you work out what the tanks hold (with 20% reserve) and the 1600 mile cruise range, I think you will find it is about 4.5 litres per mile, not per hour
 
SolentBoy said:
It's just not the same sort of experience IMHO, and I have a sense that they attract very different types of buyers.
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Spot on. And unfortunately for your friend, these buyers are still a niche, though growing by the minute.

She really looks mint, btw.
Do you know if the boat was built with the stabilizers or they were fitted afterward?
The fins position seem more aft than the boat CoG (where they're usually supposed to work best), at first sight.
 
MapisM said:
The fins position seem more aft than the boat CoG (where they're usually supposed to work best), at first sight.
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I believe the stabilizers are as fitted from new in the factory.

Help me out with the engineering please. Surely the stabilizers need to be fitted well aft of the centre of horizontal stability or whatever it is called? If you put them on the C of G it would be like balancing a plate on a stick.
 
A broker once told me that, on average, boats depreciate by 17% in the first year and then 10% per year thereafter. Unfortunately, from the start point of £2m (and bear in mind your mate didn't pay that for an Aqua 74 in 2002) I think that gets him down to around £870k in 2010. Having owned various Cranchis, Sunseekers and now a Fairline, I reckon that's about how ridiculous this hobby is!
 
MedMilo said:
A broker once told me that, on average, boats depreciate by 17% in the first year and then 10% per year thereafter. Unfortunately, from the start point of £2m (and bear in mind your mate didn't pay that for an Aqua 74 in 2002) I think that gets him down to around £870k in 2010. Having owned various Cranchis, Sunseekers and now a Fairline, I reckon that's about how ridiculous this hobby is!
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You make a good point.....but I guess whether your hobby be luxury boats, cars, women, gambling etc... its going to cost big somewhere along the line.
 
SolentBoy said:
Help me out with the engineering please. Surely the stabilizers need to be fitted well aft of the centre of horizontal stability or whatever it is called? If you put them on the C of G it would be like balancing a plate on a stick.
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Well, my comment was rather based on quite a lot of stabilized boats I've seen (on top of mine), than on any engineering thoughts.
Anyway, you should bear in mind that stabs are strictly aimed at reducing rolling (and maintain a more steady course, as a side effect), not pitching. Therefore, if you must apply a trasversal force to the hull (=stab fins) to contrast the wave force which would make the boat roll, the more "longitudinally neutral" such force is, the better.
I hope that makes some sense. If not, hopefully someone will be around soon with a more proper explanation... :)
 
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