Sell Your Boat Rafina

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Sell your boat Rafina: the quickest route is to leave her exactly where she lies at Rafina and let the buyers come to the pontoon.

Rafina holds 50 berths and runs a year-round season, which matters if you are weighing up when to bring your boat to market rather than waiting for a narrow summer window. The marina sits roughly the distance of a short transfer from Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos (ATH), a detail that buyers travelling from abroad tend to ask about early. Its position in Athens and Attica keeps it within easy reach for viewings without the congestion of the larger city marinas nearby.

Selling here works on a simple basis: 5 per cent on completion, nothing payable upfront, and no fee at all unless your boat sells. One named broker takes the boat through valuation, listing, negotiation and handover, so you deal with a single point of contact throughout rather than being passed between departments. Every viewing is private and by appointment, arranged only once a buyer has been vetted and their funds confirmed, which keeps interest genuine and your time protected.

Who Is Buying at Rafina Right Now

At Rafina, a good proportion of enquiries come from Greek owners already berthed in the marina who are trading up rather than moving on. They know the boat, often know the seller, and they go straight to the engine hours and the service history before they look at anything cosmetic. What makes them walk away is a logbook with gaps in it, or a broker who cannot answer a straight question about why the boat is being sold. Northern European buyers are a different animal. They want a boat that is already lying in Greece, with Greek paperwork in order, so they can fly in and be aboard and cruising within the same week. They inspect the berth and the mooring first, then the electrics and the tender, because they are thinking about the next charter season, not the next haul-out. They walk away the moment a survey throws up an unresolved VAT or registration question, because that is the one thing they cannot fix from abroad. Charter operators come at it from a different angle again. They are hunting for hulls that already carry Greek commercial paperwork and a secured berth, since re-flagging or re-registering a boat for charter work costs time they would rather not spend. They go through the maintenance log line by line and check what is left on the charter licence. A boat without a berth, or one needing paperwork chased up through the authorities, tends to get passed over quickly. First-time buyers stepping up from something smaller behave more cautiously than any of the above. They inspect the systems they have not had to manage before: generator, watermaker, air conditioning, and they ask a lot of questions about running costs. What sends them away is usually a boat that feels larger than they are ready for, rather than anything wrong with the boat itself. Because the season at Rafina runs year-round, enquiries do not fall away in the winter months the way they do at marinas built around a short summer window. Viewings and negotiations continue steadily across the year, which keeps the market at Rafina more even than buyers sometimes expect.

Yacht Brokers Rafina

Start with the price. A broker working at Rafina prices your boat against what has actually sold in the marina and the wider Aegean over recent months, not against the asking prices still sitting unsold on the portals. That distinction matters, because a figure built on optimism rather than completed sales either frightens buyers off or leaves money on the table. You get a number grounded in real transactions, not wishful thinking. Photography and video are done properly, at the berth, in good light, showing the boat as she actually is. That means you are not the one crawling into the engine bay with a phone camera or trying to angle out the neighbouring boats. The listing text is written to answer the questions a serious buyer would otherwise raise one by one by email or phone: engine hours, service history, ownership, lying position, what is included and what is not. A well written listing closes down half the back and forth before it starts. The listing then goes out to the international portals where buyers actually search, so the boat has reach beyond word of mouth around the marina. Enquiries come in through the broker, not through you, and they get filtered. Time wasters, tyre kickers and people without funds in place are screened out before anyone sets foot on the boat. Only vetted, funded buyers are given a private viewing by appointment, which means you are not showing strangers around your own boat on a Sunday morning. From an accepted offer onward, yacht brokers Rafina run the negotiation, coordinate the survey, and handle the paperwork through to completion, chasing documents, liaising with surveyors and lawyers, keeping both sides moving toward a signed deal. You are not translating contracts or chasing a buyer who has gone quiet. Commission is five per cent, payable on completion, nothing upfront.

Sell Your Boat Rafina: How We Actually Sell Her

It starts with a call and then a visit. One of our brokers comes to Rafina, boards her at her own berth, and looks at her as she actually is rather than as a set of numbers on a form. From that visit you get an honest valuation, based on her condition, her equipment, and what has actually sold in Greece recently, not on what you might wish she was worth.

Once you are happy with the figure, we agree an asking price and put it in writing. A listing agreement sets out what we will do, what you can expect from us, and confirms that nothing is payable up front.

Next comes the photography and video, shot at Rafina, in her own berth, in good light. We do not use stock images or generic marina shots. Buyers are looking at her, not at a template.

The listing is then published and pushed out to the international portals, so she is visible to buyers well beyond Athens. Enquiries come in from various sources, but we filter them before anyone sets foot on the pontoon. Only buyers who have shown their funds are in place are offered an appointment.

Viewings are private, arranged in advance, and held at her berth. There is no open pontoon, no casual passers-by stepping aboard. Every viewing is with someone we have already qualified.

When an offer comes in, we handle the negotiation on your behalf, keeping you informed at each stage rather than presenting you with a fait accompli. Once terms are agreed, survey and a private viewing are arranged locally, with surveyors and engineers who know the boats and the waters here.

Assuming the survey and private viewing go as expected, contracts are signed and the deposit is held properly, through the correct channel, not simply passed hand to hand. From there it is a matter of completion: the balance is paid, she is deregistered from the Greek registry, and handover takes place at Rafina.

Our fee is five per cent, payable on completion, and nothing is payable up front. You pay nothing until the boat has actually sold and the money has actually arrived.

Why Selling Her Yourself Is a Nightmare

Advertise a boat privately at Rafina and the first thing you will notice is the volume of enquiries that go nowhere. Most are not buyers at all. They are people passing time, collecting information for a boat they will never fund, or testing a number against something else they are actually negotiating on elsewhere.

Each of those enquiries still costs you a morning or an afternoon. You drive to the marina, you open her up, you run through the systems, and the person thanks you and disappears. Do that a dozen times over a season and you have given away weeks you will not get back, for nothing.

When someone does show genuine interest, you are negotiating alone. A buyer who has done any research at all knows that a private seller has no sold comparables to point to, no evidence of what similar boats have actually made. That absence of data gets used against you, and you end up defending a price with nothing behind it but your own opinion of the boat.

Deposits taken privately carry their own exposure. Without a client account standing behind the transaction, that money is just a promise, and if the sale falls through, recovering it becomes your problem, not a broker's.

Then there is the paperwork. Transfer of title and deregistration in Greece is not forgiving of small errors, and a private seller carries that exposure alone, with no one checking the detail before it is signed.

Meanwhile the boat still sits at Rafina, still costing you. Berthing, insurance, antifouling, servicing: none of that stops because she is for sale. A boat that goes unsold through a full season has quietly cost her owner a great deal more in those months than a five per cent commission would ever have taken on completion, with nothing paid up front.

Contract, Deposit and Handover

When you sell your boat through us at Rafina, the process starts with a sale and purchase agreement that sets out the boat, the price, and the conditions both sides have accepted. It is a plain written record, not a formality to skip over, and both you and the buyer sign it before anything else moves forward.

The buyer pays a deposit at that point, and that money goes into a client account rather than to you directly. It sits there, held to the terms of the agreement, until completion. That protects both sides and it is standard practice, not a mark of distrust in either direction.

Most agreements are subject to survey and a private viewing. If the surveyor or the private viewing turns up defects, you and the buyer negotiate a settlement, usually a price adjustment or a repair carried out before completion. This is agreed between the parties directly, with us facilitating rather than deciding.

Before completion, you will need to show clean title, meaning no outstanding finance registered against the boat, and evidence of her VAT status within the EU. Buyers ask for this as a matter of course and it needs to be in order well before the closing date.

On the day itself, a bill of sale is signed and the boat is deregistered from her current flag and registered to the new one. If she is on a mooring or berth agreement at Rafina, that transfers to the buyer as part of the same process. Insurance changes hands on the day of completion too, so there is no gap in cover.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sell Your Boat Rafina: When to List Her

The season at Rafina runs year-round, and that has a direct bearing on how you time a listing. Genuine interest starts to build early in the year, well before the marina fills out for summer, as buyers plan ahead for delivery in time to use a boat through the warmer months. If you want her in a new owners hands before the season gets going, the listing needs to be live and the paperwork in order well ahead of that.

Delivery is usually wanted before the height of summer, not during it. Buyers who complete in the thick of the season lose weeks of use while handover, insurance and any outstanding work are sorted, so most prefer to take a boat on before things get busy at Rafina and along the Attica coast generally.

The months when a boat shows best, both in photographs and at a private viewing, are the settled summer ones. Light is even, the water is calm in the mornings, and a boat sitting on her lines under a clear sky photographs and handles in a way that no amount of description can match. This is when a listing does its most persuasive work.

Once the season turns, interest falls away quickly. A boat still on the market late in the autumn is likely to sit through the winter with little serious activity until buyers start looking again the following spring. That gap is worth planning around rather than discovering by accident.

Summer in Athens and Attica generally brings long settled spells, strong sun, and periods of a steady prevailing wind that Greek sailors know well and plan their days around. Afternoons can turn breezier than mornings, and shade, ventilation and shelter on deck all matter more here than they might further north. Boats that sell well at Rafina tend to be set up with that pattern in mind: good cockpit shade, reliable cooling below, and enough range or comfort to make the short hop out to the islands an easy, unremarkable thing to do on a Tuesday rather than a special occasion.

Sell Your Boat Rafina: Survey, Refit and What to Fix

Start with the boat as she sits at Rafina, not as you remember her from three seasons ago. A deep clean inside and out costs little and changes everything about how a buyer reads the boat in the first ten minutes. Have the hull polished properly, not just rinsed off, and get the tenders, covers and canvas cleaned or replaced if they look tired. These are small outlays and buyers notice them immediately, because they read as evidence of how the whole boat has been kept.

Service the engines and keep the paperwork to prove it. A buyer who sees stamped service records trusts the rest of the boat more readily, and it gives your broker something concrete to show at the viewing rather than a verbal assurance. Replace perished hoses, tired batteries and any instrument that has stopped working. A surveyor will list these anyway, and it is cheaper and less awkward to deal with them yourself before he does, rather than have them appear as findings that unsettle a buyer after an offer is already on the table.

Clear your own belongings out of lockers, cabins and the saloon. A buyer needs to see the boat, not your holiday, and clutter makes a boat feel smaller and less cared for than she is.

Be careful with money that does not come back. A full repaint rarely returns its cost, and a new suite of electronics is much the same, buyers tend to want to choose their own systems in any case. Spend on condition and cleanliness rather than on cosmetic transformation.

On an older boat, a pre listing survey is worth commissioning yourself. It costs money upfront, but it removes the single biggest risk in any sale, which is a surprise that surfaces during the buyer survey and kills the deal after an offer has been accepted. Knowing what is there, and pricing accordingly, keeps a transaction moving instead of collapsing at the point it should be closing.

Once she is ready, viewings at Rafina are arranged by appointment, and only after a buyer has been vetted and their funds confirmed. Our commission is five per cent on completion, with nothing payable upfront.

Rafina in Detail

Rafina sits on the eastern coast of Attica, a working harbour rather than a marina resort, and that is precisely its appeal if you are keeping a boat here or thinking of selling one. The harbour holds fifty berths, and it operates year-round, so a viewing can be arranged in January as easily as in July. There is no summer shutdown to work around and no scramble for space once the season turns.

Walking the pontoons at Rafina, a buyer sees a harbour that works for its living. Ferries and ancillary craft share the waters nearby, fishing boats come and go, and the yachts on the berths sit among vessels that are used rather than merely displayed. It is an unpretentious setting, and for many buyers that reads as honest rather than lacking.

Rafina itself has only a slipway, so if your boat needs lifting out for survey or antifouling, the work goes to Olympic Marine at Lavrio, a short distance down the coast. Olympic Marine runs its own full-service shipyard with a Travel Lift, and it handles the haul-out and craning that Rafina cannot offer on site. This arrangement is well established and well understood by brokers working this coast, so it adds a step to the process rather than a complication.

For a seller, the practical reach from Rafina is good. Athens and its wider network of marine trades, riggers, engineers, and surveyors are within easy striking distance, and Lavrio itself has grown into a serious yachting hub in its own right. A boat lying at Rafina is never far from the people who need to inspect her, service her, or prepare her for sale.

That proximity to Athens is also what makes a boat here easy to show. Buyers flying in can view her within the day, and the short run to Lavrio for any lift-out means survey logistics do not become a drawn-out affair. Viewings are arranged by appointment, once a buyer has been vetted and funds confirmed, and Rafina supports that process well: it is close enough to the capital to be convenient, and unpolished enough to keep everyone s attention on the boat rather than the setting.

Rafina: official website

Getting Buyers to the Boat: Flights, Ferries and Transfers

Your boat lies at Rafina, and the first practical question a serious buyer asks is how they get to her. The nearest airport is Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, known by its code ATH. From there, buyers make their own way to Rafina, and we brief them on the route in advance so there is no confusion on the day.

We do not ask a buyer to turn up and hope for the best. A viewing at Rafina is arranged as an appointment, agreed in advance with both sides, so there is no waiting about on the quay and no wasted afternoon. The boat is opened ahead of time, powered up, and ready to be seen properly, not found shut up with the batteries flat and the cabin sole still damp from the last rain.

One named broker attends, someone who knows the specification of your boat in detail rather than a generalist reading from a sheet. They can answer questions on the engines, the systems, the history, and the condition without having to ring the office. That matters more than it sounds, because a buyer who has flown out for the day can tell within minutes whether they are talking to someone who knows the boat or someone who does not.

Buyers who have flown in do not come to see one boat. Most are visiting Greece to look at two or three vessels in the same trip, often across different marinas, and they have built a tight schedule around flights home. That means your boat is being judged not just on her own merits but in direct comparison with whatever else they saw that morning or will see that afternoon. A boat that is ready the moment they step aboard, with time given to them without a queue of other viewings pressing behind, leaves a different impression than one that feels like an afterthought.

This is why the viewing itself is treated as part of the sale, not a formality before it. Every buyer who reaches Rafina has already been vetted and their funds confirmed, so the time spent aboard is real time with a real prospect, not a rehearsal.

Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos (ATH): official website

The Range Selling Around Rafina

Around Rafina and the wider Attica coast, the volume market sits in cruising monohulls between ten and sixteen metres. These are the boats that move most often and most predictably. Buyers tend to be private owners looking for a boat they can sail themselves at weekends, sometimes with a view to family holidays through the Cyclades. They check the standing rigging, the engine hours, the state of the sails, and whether the antifouling and osmosis history are documented rather than assumed. Sailing catamarans hold their value well in this market and draw two distinct types of buyer. Private owners want the deck space and the stability for guests who are not necessarily confident sailors. Charter operators, who know the Aegean routes and the wear a boat takes over a season, look closely at the maintenance log, generator hours, and how the boat has been serviced between charters rather than at the fit-out alone. Both groups are patient and will walk away from a boat with gaps in its paperwork. Motor yachts and flybridge boats are bought by owners who want short hops from Rafina to the nearby islands and a platform for entertaining rather than long passages. These buyers are less concerned with sail inventory and more focused on range, fuel consumption at cruising speed, and how the boat handles when moored stern-to in a crowded harbour. Cockpit layout and shade matter to them as much as performance figures. Larger yachts move more slowly through this market, and the buyers who come to them arrive prepared. They have usually done their homework before they ever ask for a viewing, and they expect full survey history, class certification where it applies, and a clear account of any refit work. These are not impulse purchases. The process is longer, the vetting more thorough, and the eventual sale more considered on both sides. Across all four categories, the pattern is consistent. Buyers in this market are checking paperwork as carefully as they check the boat itself, and a well-documented history shortens the time a boat spends on the market considerably.

Where this page sits

• Yacht brokers Athens & Attica - the regional hub for every marina we cover here.
• Sell your boat Porto Rafti
• Sell your boat Alimos
• Yachts for sale in Greece - every current listing.
• How we sell your boat - the full brokerage process and what the 5% covers.

Rafina: Location and Fast Facts

Rafina sits on the eastern coast of Attica, a short distance from Athens on the Greek mainland. The port opens directly onto the Aegean Sea, giving straightforward access to open water without threading through city traffic first. From here, a short passage brings you within reach of the wider Aegean islands, making it a practical starting point rather than a destination in itself. It is a working harbour as much as a leisure one, with ferries and ordinary daily trade alongside the yachts, which gives the place a functional character rather than a resort feel. Athens itself remains close at hand, so the port suits owners who want easy access to the capital without keeping a boat inside it. The nearest airport is Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, known by its code ATH, which lies within a short distance of Rafina. That proximity matters in practical terms: crew changes, provisioning, and owner visits can be arranged without long transfers. Rafina is not the largest of the Attica ports, but its position on the coast, its direct opening onto the Aegean, and its nearness to both Athens and its airport make it a sensible, unglamorous base for a boat that is meant to be used rather than admired from a distance.

Boats For Sale Through Our Rafina Office

Every listing below is handled by the same brokers who take on the boats owners bring us here: one named broker, full specification, professional photography and private viewings by appointment only.

Azimut 78 Fly for sale 2011 — AOP

2011 · 24.5 m · Porto Carras Marina, Sithonia

EUR 1,800,000

Hallberg-Rassy 53 for sale 2002 — LA PEROUSE

2002 · 16.44 m · Leros

EUR 489,000

Lagoon 46 for sale 2020

2020 · 13.99 m · Olbia

EUR 489,000

Sunseeker Manhattan 66 for sale 2019 — BRIGHT 7

2019 · 20.8 m · Bodrum

EUR 1,650,000

See every yacht for sale through Yacht Brokers Greece

Sell Your Boat Rafina: Frequently Asked Questions

What does it cost to sell my boat at Rafina?

We charge 5% of the final sale price and it is payable only on completion. There is nothing to pay up front, no listing fee and no photography charge. If she does not sell, you owe us nothing at all.

Do I have to move the boat to sell her?

No. She stays exactly where she lies at Rafina and buyers come to the pontoon. Moving a boat for a sale costs money, adds risk and rarely helps. Her own berth at Rafina is the best showroom she has.

How long does it usually take to sell?

A correctly priced boat at Rafina normally sells within three to six months, and most of that time is spent waiting for the right funded buyer rather than waiting for enquiries. Overpriced boats sit for a year or longer.

Who actually shows the boat to buyers?

One named broker handles your boat from listing to handover. The same person answers the enquiry, qualifies the buyer, meets them at the berth at Rafina and runs the viewing. You are never passed around a call centre.

What paperwork do I need before listing her?

Proof of ownership, the registration document, the VAT status paperwork and invoices for any major works. Missing paperwork is the most common reason a sale collapses late. This is general information and not legal advice, so check your own position.

How do you decide what she is worth?

We look at recent completed sales of the same model, current asking prices, her condition, her hours and her equipment, then set a figure that attracts funded buyers rather than tyre kickers. A survey usually confirms that number rather than changing it.