BUCvalu

[sail1414]

Is the retail BUCvalu a good indication of
what others are paying for a particular used
boat. Most "asking" prices seem to be much
higher than this value.

[Jeff_H]

The BUC book values are only based on prior sales by brokers. Oddly enough a boat sold through a broker will often sell for less than one sold by a private owner since a good broker will generally advise a seller where he needs to be if he is going to sell the boat in a reasonable period of time which softens the seller up a bit. That does not prevent the seller from asking a higher asking price hoping to get what the seller perceives the boat to be worth. So often there is a larger gap between what the seller asks and the seller will take with a boat in brokerage vs a privately sold boat.

Then there is the issue of BUC book''s sampling. On a high production boat, BUC will have a lot of information and will base its average price on a wide sampling. This would typically result in a more accurate estimate of what these boats sell for, but, and this is a big ''but'', almost every seller thinks that their boat is in better shape than it is. The numbers in BUC would seem to suggest a low price for a clean example because that average price would include a fairly large pecentage of beat up examples for which the seller over appraised its condition.

For rarer models, the sampling is very small. I found that during my search, BUC showed numbers that were either very inflated or very low for boats which the experience history was something less than 3 boats.

Using the model that I ultimately bought, I found really beat up, stripped out racing versions with asking prices as little as $39,000 and really pristine and well equipped cruising versions that sold somewhere in the mid to high $70K range. BUC only showed one sale of these boats and a that was at a sales price that seemed very low. Without more info it would be hard to say why that price was so low. On the other hand, another model that I considered showed only 2 boats sold and prices that were nearly 50% higher than the asking prices of the examples that were on the market at the time.

In a general sense, asking prices tend to be roughly 10% to 25% higher than what the seller will take with somewhere around 15% being the norm for a seller that has had at least more than one offer to soften the seller up (or bring the seller a sense of reality as the case may be).

Good hunting,
Jeff