Skip Gundlach wrote:

In an effort to get to know these, all very minimally available in the usual
YachtWorld universe, I've done a lot of searching, and unearthed various
reviews from '95 to '99 or so. Most of them were helpful in understanding
the type of boat, but very tellingly, and the point of this post, they also
had "well equipped and good examples of this boat's selling prices range"s
quoted which were *under* any I'd found available today.


Skip,

If you are using YachtWorld as your "boat catalog", and if you
have a broker that is working for *you* not the seller, you can
ask your broker to obtain a list of the *actual* selling prices
for a sampling of a particular type of boat. (YachtWorld member
brokers are supposed to report this information.) Compare this
with the asking prices and throw out the extremes (boats that
sold for their full asking price and boats that sold for a small
fraction of their asking price) and you should be able to get a
good idea of what your target boat is actually selling for.

Of course there's no hard-fast rule. Ultimately a boat is worth
what a buyer is willing to pay for it. This may or may not be
close to what the seller is willing to part with it for. My
father used to say that if both the buyer and the seller feel
that they were ripped off, then it was probably a pretty good deal.

BTW, if you win the lottery there's a boat on page 34 of the new
(Oct 03) issue of "Sailing" that might meet your needs. ;-)

Cindy