On the one hand, someone who wants to sell a plane should prepare a comprehensive PDF containing the maintenance records, logbooks, etc. These will answer most questions and save a lot of time for everyone.
On the other hand, many people sell a plane for the same reasons they sell a car, etc i.e. it is a can of worms which they want to get rid of. And while selling a certified plane is (normally) without a liability, if you give specific warranties (e.g. the landing gear strut was replaced under an AD in 2015) then you do become liable for the discrepancy, and the liability could be unlimited if there is a resulting accident etc. And if you have forged logbook entries (a pretty common thing) then you really want to sell the plane to a mug who doesn’t do much of a prebuy check (or who pays a mechanic to do a prebuy check but the mechanic doesn’t do it). I can straight off think of a case where a plane was bought with an understanding that the logbooks and wiring diagrams would be sent on to the buyer, but they didn’t turn up, and probably for a good reason (if you supply these and the physical aircraft does not conform, that is another thing you the buyer can get you on).
Snoopy wrote:
I have emailed a few brokers via planecheck […] This is not high workload stuff…Especially for second-hand planes, we probably all have the same questions: maintenance/AD/SB status report, equipement & avionics, W&B etc… I am surprised that people list their plane and are not ready with the basic stuff.
I’ve had the same experience with the nearest Mooney representative. My maintenance company easily keeps me dangling for a month, but they do reply to calls, e-mails and whatsapp, so somehow that feels better. The love of flying conquers all this, I guess.
But looking at it from a third party perspective the whole scene is strange, if you add the cost of all this, it’s absolutely bonkers.
Snoopy wrote:
This is not high workload stuff… how hard can it be to reply with a friendly email and some information?
Not hard at all but so many brokers are completely crap.
In the last couple of weeks I have emailed a few brokers via planecheck in regard to the purchase of a 500k+ USD Cirrus. No response.
Concerning the T207A sometimes the broker didn’t reply for more than a month (“server problem”).
Some time ago I emailed Diamond about a plane. No response.
This is not high workload stuff… how hard can it be to reply with a friendly email and some information?
The only company that responded within a day was Cirrus Europe (not one of the local country "franchises).
mmgreve wrote:
I completely get why people use brokers but as a buyer they’re a pain to deal with.
I wear all three hats as the broker, owner seller & buyer. You can often meet people who are easy to deal with and truly memorable… and some who are complete potholes. That’s aviation… 
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
They could ask the owner for his consent to pass on his details…
That is what I used to do here, before we got the PM system (which is two-way anonymous – unless somebody intentionally includes their email address etc).
But also many people misunderstand what GDPR is about, and there is a huge amount of hiding behind it. And the law is country specific. The other day I was in a phone shop looking at a demo Huawei P30 PRO and asked if I can take a pic with it and transfer the RAW file to my phone, to see if I can open it in my version of Lightroom. The twit said No, GDPR doesn’t allow that
Direct sellers are great.
You would be surprised sometimes Just because somebody owns a plane and has a PPL doesn’t mean they can read, and especially write, more than 1 line at a time.
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.
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.
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.
