How Much Is My Boat Worth?

Whether you’re thinking about trading up, downsizing, or swapping your boat out for a newer model, the first thing you’ll need to determine is the market value of your current boat. We’ve gathered together a few resources boaters commonly turn to when looking for used boat values, and the pluses and limitations of each, to help simplify your search.

While, sadly, there’s no Zillow for boats, you’re still likely to start your search by looking for comps – boats of the same make and model to yours – the same way a home appraiser looks for similar houses in your neighborhood to establish the value of your home. Popular online marketplaces like boatmart.com (which powers BoatU.S. Boats for Sale), boattrader.com, yachtworld.com, and ­­yachtr.com offer a large number of listings and filters to make searching for a particular model simple. Plugging in the specifics of your current boat is the easy part. The hard part is interpreting what you find.

Important Considerations

We all love our boats and perhaps have grown used to their idiosyncrasies. But our first step must be to look closely at the boat’s condition, its upgrades, and location to rationally assess its value. Be honest with yourself about your boat’s condition, or you may end up very disappointed with the resale results. If a component is broken, accept that you’ll need to fix it, or the value or negotiation process will suffer.

• While one-of-a-kind sometimes equals priceless, more often a rare model leaves you without a comparable price. The more common your boat make and model, the better your chance of establishing its value with confidence.
• You do get some credit for upgrades! An honest appraisal of your boat’s condition also includes credit for refreshed vinyl, new electronics three years old or newer, repowers, or adding a system that wasn’t previously present such as air conditioning or a windlass. 
• Details are critical. Oftentimes online valuation tools ask about options specific to your model. Finding documentation of these options as delivered from the factory makes it easy to fill out those questions. You’ll want those specs when you draft your for-sale ad anyway, so dig up what you have now. 
• A boat’s location matters. A big cruiser on a landlocked pond will fetch a different price than the same boat on a Great Lake. If your boat is truly unusual for a given location, you may want to research what it would cost to have it transported to better prepare for that conversation with your eventual buyer.

Case Studies

To demonstrate the process of how I’d go about valuing a boat, I chose four examples to look up. Two of the boats are my own, so I am quite familiar with them. I used a number of publicly available tools to research, which I outline in each case. I centered my searches in Virginia – where my boats are located – for the first two before attempting to value boats elsewhere to examine any regional market differences.

1. 2000 Pursuit 2470

My first step was to look on boattrader.com and boatmart.com. I found similar boats of varying model years priced from $29,900 to $59,900 up and down the East Coast. Unsurprisingly, the biggest factor was the condition or age of the motors. Boats with original two-strokes made up the low end of the asking prices. Our example boat was repowered in 2015 with new four-strokes and didn’t match well with any examples I could find, so I moved on to the value guides, including ABOS Marine Blue Book, BUC Used Boat Price Guide, and the Kelley Blue Book for Boats.

I started with ABOS, because our BoatU.S. insurance partners use its commercially available reference tools. ABOS offers a boat valuation service for consumers called ­pricedigests.com that charges $35 per valuation. In contrast, bucvalu.com, from the creators of the BUC Book sold to dealerships, will give you three free valuations with registration. BUCValu estimated the Pursuit would bring between $28,000 and $31,000 dollars, not including the outboards, in good condition.

Given that I couldn’t find a truly comparable boat on the market and the value guide price did not account for the outboards, I began searching for used Yamaha outboards similar to the 10-year-old F150s. I found several examples for sale ranging in price from $6,000 to $8,000. Adding a pair of these to the value of the boat gave me a range of $40,000 at the low end and as much as $47,000. Having done all these searches, I’d be comfortable listing the boat at the low end of that range.

4. 2005 Sea Ray 260 Sundancer

For this final example, I centered my search in Henderson, Arizona, near Lake Meade, assuming a popular model with a long history would be easy to find near any large body of water. To my surprise, only seven boats showed up within 500 miles and only one exact model year match, offered at $39,500. Attempting the same task, but centering the search on South Bend, Indiana, yielded 27 Sundancers, with six 2005s on offer, although with a relatively wide price range of $27,000 to $49,000 dollars. So what to do?

Expanding the model year range up and down three years in Henderson gave me a sample of five boats, priced from $23,000 to $47,000, very similar to the South Bend market, which leads me to believe that condition rather than model year was a greater influence on the asking prices of these 20-year-old examples.

On a whim, I plugged the Sundancer search into the south Florida market, wondering if salt and sun exposure would lower the asking prices as they seemingly did with the Grady. But with the Sea Ray, for whatever reason, the Florida market skewed toward higher asking prices, with a range of $29,000 to $50,000 and one unique boat converted to outboard power that was listed at $72,000. For the record, ABOS believes $33,500 is a fair value in average condition.

Bottom Line

If you’re planning to sell your boat on your own, the resources used above represent a good starting point. Where limited comparable boats exist, a deeper dive into the relative condition of each may give you greater confidence in determining the value of your own boat, but oftentimes it can start to feel like splitting hairs. If you’re still unsure, call in an expert.

Smart Next Steps

To sell any of these example boats, look up a dealer who sells them new to see if they’re interested in trade-ins, or if they offer services to sell the boat for you for a fee. If you do offer the boat as a trade-in, you’ll get a concrete number you can act on. That’s the good part. The downside is that number, by necessity, will be less than the market value, to allow the dealer to earn some profit when they turn around and sell it. How much less depends on factors outside of your control, like how much it costs the dealer to store the boat, finance the boat’s acquisition costs, and how fast they move inventory.

Finally, depending on your boat’s value, size, or proximity to your home, you may wish to engage the services of a boat or yacht broker to value and sell your boat. Brokers who participate in online marketplaces gain access to sold boat data reported by other brokers, which gives insight into whether the difference between the asking and selling prices of a given model are a crack or a canyon. Typically, a broker will also manage the inquires and arrangements to show the boat, much like a real-estate agent. These services require a contract, and you pay a commission when the boat sells; 10% is the traditional amount, but some brokers may be flexible. It’s also important to note that brokers have a minimum commission that can be anywhere from $2,500 to $7,000 to cover the costs of advertising and marketing a boat. (See “The Valuation Survey” to learn about the benefits of getting a valuation survey.)

If you’re serious about trading up, down, or sideways, start your research early and keep it up for a few months. That way you can monitor what boats sell and how quickly as well as track asking prices and note if they change over time.