Are you considering selling your boat? We’re entering the winter months, and because of the pandemic, many people are selling items they aren’t using right now. Now may be a good time to sell your boat sitting in storage. If you’ve decided to sell your boat but you don’t know where to begin, let us help! We’d love to sell your boat for you. Greenville Marine & Sport Center is your local boat, motor, and trailer dealer, and we’ve been serving Pitt and Beaufort counties and Eastern North Carolina for 48 years. Our experienced sales and service staff would love to help you any way we can!
If you plan to sell your boat on your own but you have questions about how to price and how to advertise your boat, look no further! We’ve got you covered. From Discover Boating, here are some great tips:
Pricing Your Boat
Once it’s cleaned and prepped, you need to nail down a reasonable asking price for your boat. You can start by checking the NADA guides. But remember that the values they publish are estimates, at best. The boat’s condition will have a huge impact on its value, which those guides can’t take into account. So you should look at listings for similar boats online, in magazines, and at boat broker websites as well. As you do so, remember that the boat’s value will also be impacted by geography, and may bring a higher price in areas where boats are in high demand but a lower price in areas where they aren’t. The type of boating you’ve done also plays a role, since boats used in freshwater tend to bring higher prices than those used in saltwater. Even seasonality can affect boat pricing, because many people are more apt to buy a boat in the spring than in the late fall or winter.
After you settle on a figure, remember that a boat’s only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If the price is too high it may sit on the market for months at a time. Since it can be so hard to nail down a value, some boat sellers list at a starting point and gauge the interest level for a month or so. Then they drop the asking price a few percent for each week or month that goes by after that, until a significant number of buyers begin to show interest.
How to Advertise a Boat For Sale
With the boat fully prepped and an asking price in mind, it’s time to start generating some leads. In this day and age most people advertise their boat on a number of different internet sites that offer classifieds. Some are free, some are not, and all offer unpredictable results. You may also want to advertise in a local paper or boating magazine. And don’t neglect the tried and true tactic of simply hanging a “For Sale” sign on the boat and placing it in a high-visibility area near a busy road or marina.