Skip Gundlach wrote:

Curiouser and curiouser...

Skip, by constantly staying in touch with these brokers, you are sending the wrong message. Go look at other boats. Go
play golf. GO do anything except pester these guys to sell you one of these boats. The message you are sending is
(loosely translated) "I am really on the hook and *will* buy this boat at your price if you play me right." You need to
walk away, at least for a little while. The odds are very low that either of these boats is going to sell in the next two
weeks.




They came back with a slightly more than 10% reduction, which is still about
that much away from what we're comfortable to pay for that boat...

Not trying to hammer at anything here, but you have only two choices... buy or not. If they want to entice you to buy by
lowering the price, you'll have to wait for them to come to that conclusion.




Yesterday, the broker on the extensively rehabbed boat - "Miss Munley" ..... called and said that,
yet again, the listing broker had called him soliciting *any* offer.
Supposedly, the seller calls *her* every day wanting to know about what's
happening. He sez, pushing, make an offer, saying - "I asked her, even a
really low offer? - She sez, Yes!" so I asked what he'd recommend. It was a
third off. Of course, I knew it would never fly, but we did it, anyway.

heh. That was being polite. In that same situation, I'd have offered half.

In
between, I'd asked him to send me a copy of the sold M46s from YachtWorld's
Boat Wizard that the brokers can see but we can't. By looking at the raw
data, I was able to track down the selling broker and the listing number,
and have compiled a spreadsheet of 23 boats sold in the last 4 years. Both
these boats (the first one being High Time and the next being Miss Munley)
are way in the high end of the curve of boats offered for sale in that time.
The offers we're making are in the high end of the average selling prices,
about 10% higher than average.

Which is what I mean by saying that you seem to be on the hook here. If you want to definitely buy one of these two boats
in the near future, you are going to pay a premium for that. If you want to hang on to more of your money, you'll just
have to play a waiting game.

.....
Put that together with the broker (HT lister, not mine) saying that at 20k
more than we offered, he'd "take an offer" to the seller (with the
implication that he wouldn't if it weren't that high), and that he's
"getting really tired of cleaning the boat" (topsides guano scrub once in a
while - it's obvious nobody's done anything below), I wonder if he's
independently wealthy, that he can afford to turn away folks with money in
their hands. (He won't have anything to do with a guy who apparently had an
offer accepted, and won't present any offer that doesn't meet his client's
[only] counter - sounds like a good way to drive off business...)

Many brokers do wierd stuff. That's why they are in the boat business, where a certain amount of eccentricity is
acceptable, instead of in some more straightlaced business. OTOH that doesn't mean you have to hand them your money....

Good luck with the continuing story.

DSK