‘It is a worry’: the perfect storm for older sailing yachts
Tim Quinlan is an experienced broker with a specialism in sailing yachts.
He describes it as the most “emotional” deal he’s ever done. Not the deal itself, but for what had gone on before.
Broker Tim Quinlan sold the 33.4m sailing yacht Nomad IV in July to end a 10-year journey with his doctor client.
They began looking at steel motor sailing yachts, but Quinlan knew his client was a proper sailor who had raced RC44s. “I thought, if you buy a motor sailor, you’re not going to enjoy the ownership of it,” says Quinlan, a senior sales broker with Ocean Independence. To complicate matters, the client was in the market for two yachts. “We went round and round in circles and got to various stages on various deals,” adds Quinlan.
Eventually they came around to Nomad IV. She finished as the first monohull in the 2015 RORC Transatlantic Race, setting a monohull record of 10 days, 7 hours from Lanzarote to Grenada. Even then, closing the deal took a nerve-shredding three months with no deposit paid.
“In the end, and it is bizarre how these things happen, it was really the captain who made the sale,” says Quinlan. “Sometimes the captains can be really good and help the sale and sometimes they can be a pain and stop it.
“It was probably the most emotional sale I’ve ever done because it was so many years of disappointment. And, of course, no deal is done until you get the money.”
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Quinlan, who has been selling motor and sailing yachts since 1989, suggests the market as a whole is going through a range of sentiments.
“Our charter revenue last year was phenomenal,” he says. “This year we’ve been struggling to match that. But our boat sales are on track to be where we expect.
“I think that’s bucking the trend a bit, because if you look at what’s happened with price reductions and the market generally, it’s tough. With the ‘Trumpington’ effect and the issues around the world, people are keeping their pennies in the bank. For example, I’ve got clients with big collections of classic cars and they’re taking a big hit on these things when they sell them.”
In the super sailing yacht segment, Quinlan reckons the “biggest single issue” is with the fleet of older boats.
“They’re becoming very difficult to sell,” he says.
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He cites the example of the 1996-built 40m Royal Huisman Anakena with an asking price of $3.5m, ex VAT. “The refit price on that is going to be higher than the purchase cost,” he says. Or the 1992 32m Alloy Yachts Seaquell, which is listed at €1.79m ($1.99m).
“Someone who buys that boat has still got to pay half a million to a million euros, depending on how they run it,” he says. “Someone who can afford the yearly running costs on a boat like that will go for something much newer or even build something themselves.
“So what do you do with these old boats now? It’s intriguing me. It’s getting to the stage where you won’t be able to find a client for some of those boats. It is a bit of a worry.”
Quinlan was instrumental in the build and sale of the Swan 82 Dreamcatcher.
Hearts over heads
Such transparency is something Quinlan has learned over the years since he started selling yachts for a small brokerage in Brighton, UK. After a stint as sales director with Ancasta he spent nearly two decades with Nautor Swan and is a specialist in sailing yacht brokerage and new builds.
“I’m having a conversation with an American guy about Anakena and I’m not going to lie [about refit costs] because it’s going to come up anyway,” says Quinlan, who sailed across the Atlantic in his own Swan in 1999 with Toby Maclaurin, now Ocean Independence’s chief commercial officer.
“It doesn’t make it easy, but you’ve got to give them all the information. If you don’t, it reflects badly.”
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All deals, he reckons, are difficult. “It’s finding a boat for sale and it’s finding the right client,” he says. “And then we make it very difficult for them to buy it. We put a lot of obstacles in place with class, flag, lawyers, how much it’s going to cost, how much the captain charges, the fact you have to pay VAT on your charter … and they still go ahead and buy them. When it comes to boats, people are led by their hearts, not their heads.”
He did once sell a Swan unseen by the client during Covid. “We did a video walkthrough, an American bought it and we shipped it across,” he says. “It does happen, but it’s not always easy, for sure.” Given that, it pays to treat every enquiry equally until the brokers’ sixth sense kicks in, even if 95% of enquiries are “spurious”, he says.
“Going back a long time, a lord’s son came onto the Swan stand at the London Boat Show,” Quinlan adds. “He said, ‘Nobody will talk to me, I’m trying to buy a boat’. He was wearing tatty old jeans, a grubby old coat and a pair of plimsoles with his feet hanging out. We talked to him and I sold him a Swan 62. So you can never tell.”
Another key is to put the failures firmly in the past, including a spurious keel mark that scuppered a deal during the Nomad IV journey. “Luckily, I’ve got an appalling memory and I can’t remember all the horrendous deals that I’ve had to go through,” he says.
“If you did, you’d just get so disappointed and disheartened.”
Quinlan is working with his client on the build of a Sunreef 43.
Completely horrendous
Quinlan is actively involved in new build projects, including an eco-friendly 43m Sunreef for a client he has known for 10 years who has chartered a host of yachts such as the 43m catamaran Hemisphere. Through that, he has become involved in Project Atlas, a concept for a hybrid 110m sail-assisted superyacht.
“You never know, one day it might catch the interest of a billionaire,” he says. “It’s really trying to attract people to us for the conversation. It gives us the opportunity to meet someone who has a dream and a desire to spend some money.”
Time spent with wealthy individuals is almost never wasted, according to Quinlan.
“It’s an odd business because it’s the people you’re dealing with that make it or break it,” he says.
“Wealthy people are always interesting. They might not be pleasant. I’ve sold a big Swan where both buyer and seller were completely horrendous. I hated the deal from start to finish. You just think, why the hell am I doing this? I didn’t get out of bed for you to be rude to me today. But some of them are ridiculously nice and ridiculously pleasant.”
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What he has learned is that they are driven and tend to be risk-takers, often with an innate skill in getting people to spend a lot of money buying their companies.
“It’s very difficult to pinpoint,” Quinlan adds. “If it was something you could bottle and sell, we’d all be millionaires. So they are always interesting people to get to know for a few months, years or a decade.”
Another of Quinlan’s highlights was the build of a Swan 82 which he has sold twice. The headlines disguise the effort involved in being a broker. “I’m sure it looks very glamorous. It isn’t,” he says.
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