Cena sprzedaży jachtu – jak ją ustalić
Setting an asking price that sells the boat instead of advertising her.
Deciding how to price your boat is the one decision in a yacht sale that you cannot undo cheaply. Price her correctly and the enquiries arrive in the first fortnight, when the listing is newest and the market is paying attention. Price her ten per cent high and she becomes a reference point that makes other boats look like bargains, and by the time you reduce, the buyers who would have paid the right number have already bought something else. Learning how to price your boat is not about finding the highest defensible figure. It is about finding the figure at which a serious buyer picks up the telephone.
The short version
- European Yacht Brokers charges a flat 5% prowizji, so the asking price and the net proceeds move together predictably.
- Greece's standard VAT rate is 24% of taxable value, in force since 1 June 2016 — the reason a VAT-paid and a VAT-excluded price for the same hull are different numbers.
- Directive 2013/53/EU covers recreational craft with hull lengths from 2.5 m to 24 m, the band almost every private sale in Greece falls inside.
- The gov.gr register distinguishes private recreational vessels on the Greek flag, commercial recreational vessels of any flag, and professional tourist day ships — and the category affects the buyer pool.
- We market across roughly 70 marinas and in five languages, which widens the comparable set a price has to survive.
What follows is our working method for how to price your boat, used on every listing: what the boat is worth, what the market says, what the condition costs, and how to hold a number once you have set it. None of it depends on optimism.
How to price your boat, in the order the work is done:
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What a boat is actually worth
A boat is worth what a ready buyer will pay for her this season, in the condition she is in, lying where she lies. That is the entire definition, and every honest answer to how to price your boat is a way of estimating that one number.
Three figures get confused with value and are not value, and each one derails how to price your boat in a different way. What you paid is history, and the market does not owe you your purchase price. What you have spent since is sunk cost; a €40,000 refit rarely adds €40,000, and sometimes adds nothing at all if the buyer would have chosen different equipment. What the insurance company writes on the schedule is a replacement figure for a total loss, not an estimate of what a buyer will pay.
The fourth figure, and the dangerous one, is what a neighbour on the pontoon is asking for a similar boat. Asking prices are not sale prices. A pontoon full of yachts advertised at high numbers and going nowhere is evidence of a slow market, not a strong one. Anyone working out how to price your boat from asking prices alone is reading the noise rather than the signal.
Our broader guide to how to sell a boat in Greece sets out the full sale process. This page is only about the number, because the number determines whether the rest of the process ever starts.
The five factors that set the price
Five factors carry almost all of the variance in how to price your boat between two boats of the same model and year. Work through them in order and you will be within a few per cent of the market before you look at a single listing.
| Factor | What moves the number | Typical direction |
|---|---|---|
| Model and year | The base value: builder, length, layout, production run | Sets the bracket; everything else adjusts inside it |
| Hours and mechanical condition | Engine and generator hours, service history, imminent major work | Down, and steeply where a major service is due |
| Cosmetic and structural condition | Gelcoat, teak, upholstery, rig age, osmosis history | Down by roughly the cost of putting it right, often more |
| Tax and registration status | VAT position, flag, private or commercial category | Down sharply where unproven; restricts the buyer pool |
| Location and berth | Where she lies, whether the berth transfers, accessibility for viewings | Up where a good berth is genuinely transferable |
Two of these are frequently underweighted by owners. Tax status is the first: an unproven VAT position does not reduce the price by a percentage, it removes a whole category of buyer. Location is the second, in the opposite direction — a boat lying two hours from an international airport with a berth that can be assigned is materially easier to sell than the same boat on a hardstanding nobody can visit in February. Anyone learning how to price your boat should treat these two as structural, not cosmetic.
Finding genuine comparables
Comparables are where how to price your boat stops being theory. A genuine comparable is the same builder and model, within about two years of build, in similar condition, with a similar tax position, currently for sale or recently sold in the same region. Change any one of those and you are no longer comparing.
Build the set properly. Take six to ten boats, not two. Record for each: asking price, build year, engine hours, VAT status, country and marina, and how long she has been on the market. That last column is the one most owners skip and the one that tells you the most. A boat advertised for fourteen months at a given number is telling you that number is wrong.
Then adjust. If your comparable has 900 engine hours and yours has 2,300, that gap has a value. If hers is VAT paid with the original invoice and yours is unproven, that gap has a much larger value — our guide to VAT on second-hand boats in Greece explains why. If she lies in Croatia and yours in the Saronic Gulf, the buyer pools are different and so are the prices.
Where the model is rare, widen to the nearest equivalents and accept a wider band. Where the model is common, narrow ruthlessly. The discipline in how to price your boat is not finding the comparable that flatters her; it is finding the comparable a buyer will find, because he will find it, and he will find it before he calls you.
Condition, survey and the cost of putting it right
Condition sets the price within the bracket that model and year established, and a buyer's surveyor will establish condition whether or not you do. The only question is who finds the problems first.
A pre-sale survey by a qualified marine surveyor — the International Institute of Marine Surveying maintains a searchable membership of yacht and small craft surveyors — costs a fraction of what it protects. Once you know what is wrong you have three choices per item: fix it, discount for it, or disclose it and hold the price. All three are respectable. What is not respectable, and what costs the most, is discovering it during the buyer's survey, when every finding is a lever.
The arithmetic is unkind and worth internalising. A €6,000 fault found by the buyer's surveyor does not cost you €6,000. It costs you the €6,000, plus the buyer's assumption that if that was missed, other things were too, plus the negotiating position you lose by being on the back foot. In practice it rarely settles below €10,000. Everything in how to price your boat comes back to this: known problems are cheap and unknown ones are expensive.
The corollary is that presentation pays disproportionately. See preparing your boat for sale for what is worth doing and what is not.
VAT, flag and the tax position
Tax position is not a footnote to how to price your boat; on many boats it is the largest single adjustment in the whole calculation. Greece's standard VAT rate is 24% of taxable value, published by AADE, the Greek tax authority, and that percentage is the size of the gap a buyer is being asked to bridge when status is unproven.
State plainly, in the listing and in the first conversation, whether the asking price is VAT paid or VAT excluded. Two boats advertised at €300,000 are not the same offer if one carries a potential €72,000 exposure and the other does not. Owners who leave this ambiguous believe they are keeping options open; what they are actually doing is guaranteeing a renegotiation.
Flag and category matter for the same reason. A commercially registered yacht coming out of charter, or a vessel on a third-country flag held under temporary importation, will not fit every buyer. The gov.gr register of pleasure and tourist vessels separates private Greek-flagged recreational vessels, commercial recreational vessels of any flag, and professional tourist day ships, and each category reaches a different market.
The practical rule when working out how to price your boat is to price for the buyer you can actually reach. A VAT-excluded yacht priced as though EU buyers were competing for her will sit. Priced honestly for the non-EU market she can sell quickly and at a fair number. If the boat has chartered, read selling an ex-charter yacht before you set anything.
Where and how she lies
Where a boat lies changes what she is worth, and how to price your boat has to account for it, and by more than most owners expect. Accessibility is the mechanism: a yacht a buyer can see this weekend sells for more than the same yacht he must plan a trip to reach.
Four things about the berth feed into the number. Whether it transfers with the sale, and on what terms. How far it is from an international airport, since a two-hour transfer costs a buyer a day and a five-hour transfer costs him a weekend. Whether she is afloat and can be shown running, or ashore under a cover. And what the berth costs per year, because the buyer is inheriting that bill.
Boats ashore are systematically harder to sell and are usually priced lower for it. That is not irrational buyer behaviour: a covered boat on a hardstanding cannot be demonstrated, and a private viewing that cannot include the engines running answers fewer questions than one that can. If the boat is going to be marketed through the season, the cost of keeping her afloat and presentable is usually recovered in the price.
None of this argues for moving a boat before a sale, which is expensive and rarely repays itself. It argues for being realistic. Part of how to price your boat is pricing the situation she is actually in, not the situation you would prefer.
How to price your boat: setting the asking price
This is where how to price your boat becomes a single decision. Set the asking price from the evidence, then add a deliberate, small negotiating margin — not a hopeful one. In our experience a margin of three to five per cent above the number you will accept is enough to let a buyer feel he has negotiated, and small enough that he does not dismiss the listing before he calls.
Decide your walk-away number before the boat is advertised and write it down. Deciding it during a negotiation, at eleven at night, after a survey has found three items, is how owners accept figures they later resent. Knowing how to price your boat includes knowing the floor, and holding it calmly.
Work in net terms as well as gross. At a flat 5% commission the arithmetic is simple: on a €250,000 sale the commission is €12,500, and any yard work, VAT on services and berth arrears come off the balance. Owners who only ever look at the headline number are surprised at completion; owners who have modelled the net figure are not.
Round sensibly. €249,000 reads as a considered price; €247,350 reads as an anxious one. And never advertise a number you would refuse, because every enquiry it generates is a conversation you will have to end badly.
When and how to reduce
The market answers within weeks, and it is the final word on how to price your boat. and the answer is in the enquiry log rather than in anyone's opinion. Read it against this table and act on it rather than waiting for the season to turn.
| Signal in the first 6 weeks | What it means | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Steady enquiries, viewings booked, offers within 5% | Priced correctly | Hold. Negotiate on the boat, not the number |
| Enquiries but no viewings | The listing sells the boat; the price stops the visit | Review comparables; a single correction of 5–8% |
| Viewings but no offers | Condition or presentation is undercutting the price | Fix the presentation before touching the price |
| Almost no enquiries at all | Priced outside the bracket buyers are searching | A decisive correction into the next search band |
| Repeated low offers from serious buyers | The market has told you its number | Believe it, or withdraw and re-list next season |
Two disciplines matter more than the size of any reduction. Reduce once and meaningfully, rather than in a series of small cuts — a drip of reductions teaches every watching buyer to wait for the next one. And reduce into a search band: a boat at €312,000 is invisible to everyone filtering under €300,000, so the move from €312,000 to €299,000 buys far more visibility than its four per cent suggests. That single insight is worth more than any other rule about how to price your boat.
Najczęściej zadawane pytania
Jak wycenić jacht, gdy brakuje porównywalnych ofert?
Widen the set. How to price your boat without direct comparables is a matter of bracketing: take the nearest equivalents by length, builder tier and age, accept a wider band, and price toward the lower half of it. Rare boats reach fewer buyers, so a keen price is not a concession; it is the cost of a smaller market.
Czy refit podnosi wartość o swój koszt?
Almost never. Refits protect value rather than create it. New standing rigging, a recent service or fresh antifoul remove a buyer's objection and keep the boat in the bracket; they rarely lift her above it. Price the boat, then mention the refit.
Czy przed wystawieniem warto zrobić ekspertyzę?
On most boats, yes. A pre-sale survey costs a fraction of what an unknown fault costs in negotiation, and it lets you decide whether to fix, discount or disclose. Buyers treat a seller who already knows the answers as a seller who is not hiding anything.
Jaki margines negocjacji powinna zawierać cena ofertowa?
Three to five per cent above your walk-away figure is usually right. More than that and buyers filter the boat out before calling. Less and you have no room to close a deal that is otherwise agreed. Decide the floor before advertising, not during the negotiation.
Czy status VAT naprawdę tak bardzo zmienia cenę?
Yes. At the Greek standard rate of 24%, an unproven position is a material exposure a buyer must price, and it narrows the field to buyers who can live with it. Settling the question before listing is the cheapest step in the entire sale.
Jak długo czekać przed obniżeniem ceny?
Six to eight weeks of proper marketing is enough to read the market. If enquiries are absent, waiting does not help; the listing only gets older. Make one decisive correction into the next search band rather than several small ones.
We work out how to price your boat against real comparables and recent sales, not against wishful asking prices, and we tell you the number we believe she will achieve. Flat 5% commission, five languages, one point of contact.