Brokers are Okay!
19 January 2013 | St. Augustine, FL
(About the photo--that's Maule Lake Marina in North Miami, back in the good old days! My broker's boat is the trawler on the end of B-Dock, with the tender on the stern.)
"Part of a broker's job is to take the emotion out of the boat buying experience," Nils said to me over the phone. He'd called to tell me that the seller of the Ericson 36C that we'd viewed the previous weekend wasn't budging on his price. We'd made an offer, and then upped our offer, but the seller wasn't willing to counter. Will and Maryann and I sat in our living room in St. Augustine. I'd just finished explaining to Will about how much emotion is involved in the buying and selling of boats.
"It was easier to buy our house," Will said.
There's the old cliché about the two best days of a sailor's life--the day you buy your boat and the day you sell your boat. And I suspected that the owner of the Ericson was attached to his boat and just didn't want to let it go that easily. Unfortunately, Will had become attached to it too. We both spent the week after we viewed it fantasizing about prettying it up, pricing out marinas, getting insurance quotes and looking at our finances to figure out how on earth we'd be able to fit a boat into the picture. The truth was that we were both ready, whether we could afford it or not. Will lost his mother, early and unexpectedly, a few months ago. We were both watching our daughter grow faster than we'd ever dreamed she would. She was having whole conversations with us, and saying, "I love you, sailboat," when she and I passed Oyster Creek every morning at the beginning of our long commute to Jacksonville. And I was burnt out--three years of commuting two hours a day and trying to kick ass ay my career, birthing a child and then a book, and keeping up with my duties as mom and partner were getting to me. Will's commute was just as long and he was juggling an online MBA program with all his other responsibilities. I'm not saying our lives are any harder than anybody else's, and every day I am thankful for our health and our jobs and our home. But neither Will nor I are "good enough" types of people. We're not people who settle. And we were ready to take a big risk and buy a boat.
I could easily say that I've spent the majority of my adult life boat shopping. Even when I had a boat, I still looked at boats and studied them. My conversations with brokers usually proved that I knew just as much about boats as they did. But the two boats I've bought and sold in my adult life have been private sales, without brokers involved. I've never worked with one closely. Nils was a liveaboard from Maule Lake Marina, the small and tightly-knit community in North Miami where I'd spent my graduate school years aboard my 1969 Columbia 28. I'd always liked him--an easygoing and friendly soul who always seemed ready to offer help. He showed up at the Miami Book Fair, bought a book, and offered his help in our boat search. Nils works for Sparkman & Stephens. He sells big, expensive boats. Smallish sailboats and thirty-somethings going trough premature midlife crises are not part of his norm. "It doesn't matter to me how much money the client has," he told me. "I want to treat every client the same."
Before he let us make an offer, which we were both anxious to do, he insisted on doing hours of research on the particular model of boat. He looked at sales data of similar boats. He enlisted the help of a professional appraiser who was also a friend of his. He and I had several long discussions about osmosis and blisters (there was no evidence of either of these on the boat but they are a concern of mine in any old fiberglass boat), engine hours, equipment, seaworthiness, and what we would check on a sea trial should the seller agree to one of our offers. Nils brought rational thought into a completely irrational process.
"I honestly think it's time for us to move on," Nils said over the phone. I agreed and Will and Maryann and I set out for a walk around our neighborhood to clear our heads. We walked by the Intracoastal, where Maryann pointed to the anchored sailboats and said, "Muah, sailboat! Sailboat hug!"
"Anything could happen," I said to Will. Optimism has always been my biggest strength, and at this point in our boat search it was something we both sorely needed.
"There aren't any other boats I've liked as much," Will said. "I'm tired of hearing about this supposed 'buyers' market' that we're in."
"Anything could happen," I said.