An acquaintance of mine is currently in the market for a higher priced >500k € single prop.
Planecheck etc.. show a few of those, and the respective sellers have been emailed, in some cases multiple times, only to receive not one word of a reply from them.
I’ve had a similar experience inquiring about a plane. Initially no response, then after a rew replies my last email wasn’t answered for a month until I sent it again.
Always featuring some lame excuse.
Not exactly a beneficial conduct for the owner of the plane who hires a broker to sell.
Is selling airplanes so easy that the brokers simply don’t have to care?
Is there some unofficial codex among plane brokers about not using email ;) ? Or is it simply that there are more unprofessional people involved in small airplane trading?
I give an enquiry all the photos and maintenance data I have within a day, usually as soon as I get to my laptop. I encourage everyone to use Whatsapp as they will get whatever info I have on my phone, or an answer to a simple question near instantly. It is much better than messing around with things like Afors messages. I’m in the middle of a turbine transaction, worth say 12x G2 SR22’s in value. The level of service is nearly worse at that end of the market. Take comfort in the fact the broker doesn’t get paid, unless the aeroplane is sold. So he should want to make the deal happen. If he’s smart he won’t market aeroplanes for people who don’t want to sell.
If all else fails… ask them for their bank details, you should get a reply 
You are obviously a major exception William! I’d buy a plane from you anyday!
Aren’t some just putting it up there to sound the market, buy counting the number of replies ?
Sure, there is a lot of this out there.
But I think one issue is that adult illiteracy exists at all levels
Another is that a lot of people live just with a phone (no laptop or PC) and thus any significant reading, let alone writing, is a painful experience. Anything longer than 1 line is a waste of their time. So they avoid comms as much as possible. That however is today’s society… hence most people use IM i.e. whatsapp etc. Unfortunately you cannot easily (well, you could, but you would be crazy to do it) publish a whatsapp identity.
Another issue is that a lot of people struggle with email config:
My GF recently found her incoming email stopped working. I am no IT expert but I know about DNS etc and we found that the company which holds the domain, and which recently took over the previous company (which was run by one guy and with great customer service), managed to acquire some old email contact addresses for the various domains. They then proceeded to email them all “for verification purposes” and, in the arrogant manner so typical of today’s corporate conduct, simply killed all domains whose contact emails bounced! Their defence was that they emailed warnings well beforehand… well, yes, the twats sent them to the same bouncing addresses! A day of communicating via “support tickets” (another symbol of today’s corporate arrogance) sorted it out, but without my help she would not have been able to sort it. And a month later her mum’s email did the same… guess why?
So a lot of people use gmail, which is great if you want to have a lot of fun and games because of gmail’s stupid spam rules. It is completely possible to be totally unable to send email to a particular recipient who uses gmail.
If no phone/whatsup number just don’t bother, but for email have you tried asking a female partner to do the inquiry on your behalf ;)
Peter wrote:
So a lot of people use gmail, which is great if you want to have a lot of fun and games because of gmail’s stupid spam rules. It is completely possible to be totally unable to send email to a particular recipient who uses gmail.
At least gmail tells you when it rejects an email.
Over the weekend I was emailing someone at a company from whom I’d ordered some test gear, and my last reply (perfectly innocuous, small company – asking how I’d found out about them), gmail bounced my email as spam. It was a reply to a chain that gmail had already seen, too. Most places just send suspected spam to the great bitbucket in the sky so you never know your email never got delivered. At least I could retry it – I just wrote a longer reply, and gmail accepted it! Not sure what words triggered gmail’s spam filter and my domain has all the proper SPF stuff in it and has been around since ~2000 (and I’ve been running the mail server that long too).
At least gmail tells you when it rejects an email.
It depends. It will bounce back one sent to a nonexistent username. But stuff identified as spam is usually discarded silently.
I just wrote a longer reply, and gmail accepted it! Not sure what words triggered gmail’s spam filter and my domain has all the proper SPF stuff in it and has been around since ~2000
That’s part of the stupidity of gmail. I did some tests a while ago. Short emails get dumped a lot, especially if they contain a URL. That kind of banal filtering goes back to the days when “via**ra” in the Subject would mean 100% spam Google have the resources to do much better (e.g. signaturing across millions of incoming emails, to identify a spammer in action) but for some reason they can’t be bothered.
(and I’ve been running the mail server that long too).
That’s not a good idea; the IP blocks belonging to ISPs for dishing out to dynamic IP users are often blacklisted whole, and “fixed IPs” are usually allocated out of these dynamic IP blocks. It is better to use a commercial SMTP server. I now use this one; it does DKIM too which “should be” bulletproof assuming the sender domain is not itself blacklisted. I have just emailed ~700 people through it and zero bounced back as spam. SPF alone would not have achieved that.
However, back to the topic, I think the reason why the sellers don’t answer emails is the same as why so many people don’t answer emails: they live for the day, they have only the phone, and it is too much trouble.
Also, I am sure some of them do what estate agents do when selling houses. Some agents go for a quick sale and rapid stock turnover. Others go for slow sales and fetching the highest price. And the thing which planes and houses have in common is that the owners have unrealistic expectations of how much it is worth, and feel better with a slow sale at a higher price.
I’d pay more when everything works flawlessly, quickly and easily and I have the feeling I deal with good persons. If I have to chase a person to sell something to me I’ll feel like I deserve a discount fornmy effort to be able to buy it from them. A simple „contact via phone preferred“ goes al long way in that regard.
I am in the process of buying a plane and I’ll suggest anyone considering to sell a plane through a broker that they test the broker out by asking about one of their other planes. See it they’re responsive and have the info you ask for.
Cirrus is very good. They reply back straight away and has all the info you’re likely to ask about ready in pdf format. A few even follow up subsequently to check on my thoughts.
I have yet to meet a good independent broker. The ones I have tried to talk to don’t reply to emails, don’t have the information you ask for and never calls you back if they mistakenly picked up the phone (they always promise to as they need to "figure out and come back). I have spent the last 3 weeks trying to track down one of them to view a plane they have for sale and now I’ve given up. I even asked the maintenance firm to send me the owners details so I can talk to the owner directly but in a GDPR world that is obviously not possible. On another occasion I agreed to fly over to have a look at a plane and luckily gave the guy a call the day before just to check that a delay to my arrival would be OK. He had no idea I was coming and the plane was away, so I had to re-send him the correspondence to prove the agreement, though obviously a mute point.
Direct sellers are great. They have a vested interest in selling their plane and I have found them to be very responsive.
Maintenance firms are great even though they have no (direct) incentive to take time discussing the plane in question and send the maintenance records that the broker failed to deliver.
I completely get why people use brokers but as a buyer they’re a pain to deal with.
