Brought on by thread on another forum, here are my experiences: If you’ve ever tried selling an aircraft on your own, you’ll very quickly see the benefit of a broker. The 6 or 8% he/she charges is a small price to pay for the insanity-inducing stuff you’ll encounter from most customers. Take it from me – I’ve attempted it twice and I’ll never sell my own aircraft without a broker again.
Or how about having buyers ask you for documents listing every serial number of every screw that went into the engine overhaul? No? How about 20 tire kickers in a row “test flying” the aircraft at your expense, with zero intention of buying? How about the 5 buyers that want you to fly plane to their mechanic, have a full pre-buy made by their guy, that you pay for (“that’s non-negotiable, pal”)? Or how about the minister of some shi**y/scammy congreagtion in Florida who after winning the bid on it, refuses to pay and want you to donate it to his ministry for charity when you finally corner him? Or the 300 guys calling asking for a scanned copy of every single entry of every logbook. I don’t know about you, but scanning 25 logbooks dating back to the 50’s is a full time weeklong deal, if not more. But they want every page. Not just the last 30 years. Every page.
These have all happened to me. Buyers are a nightmare at times. They fully buy in to the “the customer is always right” paradigm, and will think nothing to ask for stuff that will literally take you a week to find the answer to, then never even return your email once you’ve provided this info. When you think you have literally everything covered, they’ll still find a way to ask you the one question you can’t easily answer without putting in a lot of time and effort: “was the paint job done to ISO 9001 environmental standards?”, “was it ever flown abroad?” or “what periods was it hangared?”.
Trust me, there’s a reason brokers exist. They shield you from all the numbnuts. Money well spent, if you ask me.
AdamFrisch wrote:
the customer is always right
That doesn’t really work at all, not officially and not “off the record” when selling/buying consumer type products (everything but houses and land property) between private persons. It all boils down to how much you want to sell it, and how greedy you are, and how much a potential buyer really wants to buy.
AdamFrisch wrote:
Money well spent, if you ask me.
Well, that would depend on one’s own capabilities, experience & time.
That said, I have lot’s of horror stories of GA transactions gone wrong, very wrong … In all cases, there was no professional agents involved.
Why do you think you can sell something to somebody that does not want to buy it? The buyer has to believe he’s about to make a good deal. Offer it for a good price and you will find a buyer rather quickly.
I would never do the kind of leg work you mentioned. It’s not relevant to the buyer. I provide the required information and tell him that the rest is OK and the plane is like I describe it. Do you believe the broker scans all logbook pages and lets every idiot do a test flight at his expense?
I did not even test fly my Cirrus before I bought it. I flew in the RHS with the seller – to the shop that did the prebuy, that was it. 6 weeks later I picked it up.I would also not let every buyer fly it. An experienced Cirrus pilot who pays for the fuel, okay, all others could fly with me or go look at some other plane. Also my insurance wants to be informed about ecery pilot who flies the plane.
A good Cirrus, offered for a fair price, is sold very quickly at the moment – and so are all other good airplanes. It’s only the real “dogs” that were parked outdoor for ten years and are € 50.000 too expensive that are never sold …
The way to sell a plane is to collect together all the logbooks etc and shoot them into a PDF, together with a load of photos, and send that to anyone who enquires.
If someone doesn’t accept such documentation, they can take a walk.
I sold a friend’s TB20GT by knocking up a nice simple website. Took me an hour or two.
One problem is that most sellers can’t be bothered to do that. So they get a lot of time wasters.
Another problem is that many buyers can’t or won’t read…
Then, the buyer can (and should, but many don’t) do a prebuy inspection.
It really all depends on the value of the aircraft you want to sell (or buy). A 35 year old Pa28 is a completely different thing to sell than a 5 year old KingAir or CitationJet. No broker on this planet (other than maybe some newbie who wants to get into the business) will do all the work described for that Pa28 on the basis of 6% of the estimated 15.000$ that airplane is going to be sold at – his hourly rate would be in the order of one Dollar. On the other hand, nobody would pay a broker 6% of 5M$ for the CJ just to scan the lookbooks and arrange dates with potential customers…
However, the seller can photo the logs himself – unless he/she doesn’t know how to use a camera phone and make a PDF. You don’t need a broker for that. In fact I struggle to see why one would need a broker for any piston plane – other than scenarios (admittedly common) where the seller is very busy, doesn’t want to do any work for some reason, or feels he/she is not sufficiently hard nosed to deal with buyers.
Peter wrote:
You don’t need a broker for that.
Absolutely not. Back when I was involved in selling aircraft (around 5 or so which we operated in our little company) I would have plainly refused to scan all those logbooks. The buyers had to (and did!) trust our word that the logbooks were all there and that they could see them for as long as they wanted upon inspection of the aircraft. Or otherwise call the company who did the maintenance and get it confirmed by them.
In the last 24 month I sold 2 aircraft. A broker would have goten well over 20.000 Euro on each of those sales. So doing the work myself was time well spent as I have no way to make such kind of money after taxes in a similar time.
The key is to be well prepared. I collected all relevant information, pictures etc. in a proper pdf file. That also included clear statements as where the aircraft can be seen, what kind of test flight can be done, who pays for it, what I would charge to fly the plane to a prebuy at some other place etc.
That worked very well for me. Then if somebody did email or call I sent the pdf and usually that did answer all questions. Then some common sense on which kind of person can actually buy such an expensive plane to sort out criminals or other time wasters and the process did work out quite well.
