Yacht Shopping and the Wonderful World Wide Web

As with so much in life today, much of a buyer’s yacht shopping is accomplished whilst wearing slippers or between meetings, after dinner, before breakfast or at other odd times when there is a time window, in front of a screen, on a phone or clutching a tablet.

As we have said before, the days of beginning your yacht buying mission traipsing around marinas to see what is on the market, going aboard a series of options to try them for size and decide whether they might suit you, are long gone.

All types, shapes and sizes of boat and yacht are available at the click of a button, with imagery, technical specifications and opinions about the good, bad and the ugly. Of course, there is plenty of misinformation added into all this wonderful content, but the canny buyer will dig deep to filter out the rubbish factor.

The start of this search is normally dominated by the massive yacht search portals, and one in particular that has gobbled up many small portals internationally, and which offers an enormous amount of content and as such is widely used throughout the planet.

Yacht brokers and new yacht distributors rely on its use. It also helpfully has a CRM package which allows them to run their client book and their listings without investing in the expense of a software package for their own business. Many of these businesses are small and the use of Salesforce or one of the other CRMs for commercial sales is serious overkill in a business employing only a handful of people.

Other yacht search platforms remain on the periphery and take the crumbs from its well organised and funded table.

Yacht owners can be sure that they will see their yacht on this platform, as will their friends, colleagues and of course the yacht searcher who is interested in becoming her next owner.

So far so good and everyone is happy… However, in 2024, the management of this platform decided that the contribution that they were making to the international yacht sales process, was being insufficiently rewarded in terms of fees charged. Prices were seriously hiked, there was much gnashing of teeth in the yacht sales community, yachting companies didn’t renew their contracts and there were angry and upset boat people the world over, for whom this platform was now a swearword.

Without a proper platform from which to offer their yachts, or a CRM package from which to manage their sales process, life became distinctly more awkward.

Of course, nature (and the yacht business) deplores a vacuum, and other platforms quickly stepped up to take up the slack and increased their market share a little. But not a significant amount.

At Berthon we like graphs and statistics of all sorts and follow trends mainly for our business but also for the industry as a whole. This main platform (at the time of writing) has retained roughly the same number of listings worldwide as it had before it’s tussle with the industry. But of course, the number of yachts and boats coming to the market in total is increasing, so their market share has dwindled. Other platforms are catching up – a little.

The joy of a dominant platform is that yacht buyers can be lazy. Everything for sale is in one place. OK there may be replications and the odd ghost listing but its where you go to find the yacht of your dreams… Until it isn’t… its value as the Autotrader of yacht sales reduces as it stops being the repository of just about all the available inventory on the planet. Of course, it is still jolly useful, but the vacuum that it has created by its price hikes, is slowly but surely sucking the usefulness out of its offering… not today, or tomorrow or next week. Maybe not even next year. But as time passes its relevance will dwindle. It devours content. It has no mission without content. The less of a catch all for the whole market it is, the more that yacht sales businesses will feel that they don’t have to use and pay for it.

Maybe its management are right to look at the model of eBay where the cost of selling on the platform is a vastly higher percentage of the margin (or brokerage commission) than that charged for hosting brokers’ yachts on their platform. But frankly, we don’t think so. Successful yacht businesses have a level of skill and knowledge and many other functions to fulfil for magic to happen and for a yacht to sell. Sticking a product on eBay, delivering an invoice and arranging for delivery is something that most of us have done. It doesn’t challenge the grey cells.

Pitching for a new listing, understanding her, putting together the specification, arranging photography, video and collateral material, print advertising and all the other marketing is an expensive exercise which only works well with resource, investment and good technical knowledge. Managing the sale for the owner, dealing with clients, drafting the contract, conducting the sea trial, dealing with the survey, title, ownership, due diligence and all the rest, make a yacht broker a sailor, refit manager, lawyer, salesperson and psychiatrist all rolled into one.

Having a platform taking a very big chunk of your margin for one entry, no knowledge of the yacht and imperfect market data seems harsh, particularly as however clever the technology, discovering exactly how an enquiry was received and actioned is quite impossible. We know, as mentioned earlier, we spend a lot of time on analysis. Our conclusion is that 55% of our business is repeat and this has remained constant over the last dozen years. So, if someone comes back to Berthon, but has seen a yacht on the commercial platform under our name, whilst in touch with us – is that the platform’s lead or ours?

The writer is ancient enough to remember the blue perils at Berthon with clear lead source information to be ticked. Hard copy, requiring a hard mail address (imagine!) and often the clients helped us to fill them in. Then it was easy to tick Walk In, print advertising and the rest. The world wide web hadn’t yet been invented and people were clear about how they had found out about the yacht they bought from us.

Today, we take great trouble to identify where leads come from. We ask, we guess and try to unravel it. For us it is an attempt to see what works well. The old adage that half of all your marketing is useless holds true today – as in 2025, we still have no real idea which half it is! What is massively clear is that our clients are as confused as we are, as the osmosis of information delivery means that they have attacked the information on the yacht that turns out to be ‘the one’ from many different angles. Different websites, print advertising, and all number of other sources melding into a – can’t remember think it was your website – or not…

All of this means, that it is the job of our marketing team to attack the web from all the different means possible, to ensure that our yachts for sale are visible and well presented. As the likes of Mr Google become ever more powerful, the joys of constant SEO and the long-tailed search provide a platform even here for our yachts in the greatest product bazaar that the planet has ever seen. And now AI is set to join in too.

Social media is also a great source with LinkedIn, Instagram and the rest. Our YouTube channel has an astonishing 23,500 subscribers. However, by far the most fun is berthoninternational.com which is optimised and was built carefully for us, together with berthonusa.com, berthonscandinavia.se and berthonspain.com. As we learn more about the art of the possible and how to deliver more and higher quality information, these sites grow and thrive. It is always nice to hear clients see a yacht on a commercial platform, see the Berthon trademark and come to our site for an altogether better presentation. As we work away at our own websites, we are hoping that these clients will visit Berthon first, and this is certainly starting to happen.

Getting the information right requires attention to detail and technical knowledge, imagery is from our inhouse photographer Harry in the UK and assisted by Nathalie in our Spanish office. They are also at the forefront of our video offering which brings our yachts – and brokers – right into the room with you. All these factors also only work with constant update of the information that we are carrying across all the platforms that we use. This takes commitment, time and staff but we feel that it is worth the investment.

Of course, print advertising still figures to a degree, although its usefulness is being eclipsed by the more modern, dynamic, interactive and 3 dimensional ways in which yachts are now presented.

Then there are boat shows and local events and in-house events like our Bluewater Weekend. These are invaluable to show the yachts that we are selling and so that we can meet new clients and importantly those that we know, and to dive into the detail, live onboard the yacht.

Our own in-house publications – the Berthon Book, Winter Collection and the Market Report in which you have found these scribblings are also a key part of marketing the yachts that we sell, with interactive segments featuring them which can be consumed along with the Berthon Forecast!

Without a CRM, life as a yacht broker is hard with a crashing Outlook and likely masses of spreadsheets, post it notes and the rest to try to keep up. Having a CRM which is controlled by a business other than your own strikes us as brave. With all the due diligence now required, GDPR rules and all the possibilities that new technology can bring to keep in touch why would you? Our new CRM (called Bob by his friends) was built for us by a firm of software developers. Not the cheapest option, but we felt that we wanted a solution built around us, our business, our clients and our yachts. Because we own the intellectual property we are in charge, and we can update and improve the system as we go along. We can also keep our data safe and secure. No one can switch Bob off.

As the Berthon Sales Group grows and we develop businesses in the USA, Scandinavia, Spain and the UK, we are excited about what more we can do, and how with some effort and investment we can continue to improve the service to clients both sellers and buyers and we can increase the visibility of the Berthon fleet as we do so. With the infrastructure in place, we are free to look at new territories and new business opportunities knowing that we have the infrastructure to support them well.

So, what of these other external portals – the mighty one that delivers the standard and big bills (hiked again in 2025) and the smaller platforms who are working to grow? We think that there will be changes in this market but that they will be gradual. The smaller brokerage houses will have to pay up as they have no option. The external portals are their only shop front to the web. Those who have withdrawn will find that there is more to hosting a successful website than they think. It is a journey requiring a lot of work, time and investment.

For us, you will continue to see the Berthon fleet on all the major external platforms whilst they remain useful. Yacht owners expect it and we will deliver. Yacht marketing and sales is many faceted and the external website is an essential part of that process today. It will continue to be so, until the day that it isn’t… like so much in life…

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