Hi Harry,

Honored I'm sure that you grace this thread with your renouned wisdom.
I've enjoyed reading your postings with relish time and time again!

I guess that I've figured that there is no "official pricing" on boats,
as it is a largely unregulated market, and because many folks don't buy
them based on rationality but after getting hooked at a Marina.

I can well understand that used prices are not an exact rocket science.
Among the zillions of points of view one can envisage, I see two
present in this thread which tend to cancel one another out:

A. Past prices make up the market, and thus an average of all prices
of boats sold is the real used boat price. The premise here is that
nobody in their right mind will sell you a comparable boat for
substantially less than another one might have sold for in the recent
past. This approach is however fundamentally flawed, because it fails
to take into account the people involved. Some folks might find it of
great value to unload their used boat fast at a very low price. Other
folks might never be able to live down the perceived loss of their
initial investment and prefer to wait for an imaginary buyer, leaving
the task of selling the boat to their heirs upon their demise. So the
real market price would be what two rational people, a buyer and a
seller, come to agree upon as a fair and "rational" price based upon
costs incurred by the initial owner, costs which will be transfered
with the purchase to the next owner, with some allowance for emotional
attachment of either party distorting the mix.

B. Extrapolations of technical and financial parameters establish the
value of the boat. Similarly to a cost accounting process, the
materials used, their ageing characteristics, their condition, a survey
of the boat, its features and options would constitute a rational basis
for estimating the value and price of a used boat. This approach also
fails to take into account the human factor. We're dealing with
emotional and sometimes irrational people who invest their ego and not
just their money into boats. We're talking dreams, aspirations,
expectations, and even neuroses getting projected into a boat's
purchase or sale. This means that in some cases both the buyer and the
seller make a deal and each feels that they've been burned. It can also
mean, though surely less often, that each party feels that they've made
out like bandits with a sweet sweet deal. Selling a used car I once
experienced that. It had given me so much trouble I advertised it well
under market price. The buyer was so excited he mailed me a check
without even seeing the car. He was a happy sailor. I was happy too, I
would have paid to get rid of it!

So please forgive me if I don't align my checkbook with actual sale
prices. Other people paid those prices for their own reasons which may
be sensibly different than mine. Prices tend to be "all over the place"
especially when, as you justly state, there is no organized used boat
market. So I'll keep my own grey cells as my best basis of pricing,
whether books, brokers or sellers think otherwise. I guess the real
market price I will end up paying (this will then become a "real" past
market price) is going to be what I'll be willing to pay = a lot of
boat for a lot of money.

Best,

Rich