Where this starts
A brokerage I worked with had a yacht that had been listed for most of a year. Good yacht, decent price, competent broker. The owner called every few weeks with the same question, and the honest answer was always a version of "we are marketing her". We were. The portals had her, the brochure had gone out twice, two co-brokers had shown her. What we did not have was a way to show the owner what had happened, and what we proposed to do about it, in a form he could hold in his hand.
That year taught me more about the yacht market than any transaction that went smoothly.
The broker's chair
I spent years selling yachts as a broker and working for shipyards. The mechanics stay with you: the mandate that needs renewing, the co-broker who wants material by tonight, the buyer who has three nearly identical presentations open and cannot tell the yachts apart, the price change that reaches the portals but never reaches the people who looked in spring.
Brokers do the hardest part of a sale. Months of marketing, owner management, viewings across time zones, negotiation, closing. Commission pays for that work, and a good central agent is the seller's best asset. The things that go wrong are usually around the broker, not because of the broker: an owner's expectation, thin material from the last refit, documents nobody scanned, tools that age.
The analyst's habit
Before YachtAddress I ran an independent yacht advisory practice, writing pre-purchase analyses for buyers and sale reviews for owners. The habit that stuck is simple: write down what is actually happening. Comparable inventory, time on market, price history, what buyers asked and what they did not say. Put it on one page the next conversation can use.
That habit became a book, What They Don't Tell You Before You Buy a Yacht, and a few pieces of industry commentary. It is also the reason the tools on this site refuse to invent a probability of sale. They list questions. The market answers them.
Fifteen years of websites
The other half of my working life was building websites, long before the first yacht. When I put the two together, the gap was obvious. A yacht is sold with a static listing and a fragmented trail of PDFs, while the yacht herself keeps changing. Digital presentation has to stay relevant through the whole sales period, not only on launch day. That is the problem YachtAddress was founded to solve, and it is why I build it rather than just describe it.
Dubai
I am based in Dubai and work internationally. The Gulf is a winter base, an ownership market and, increasingly, a place where the decision is made before the yacht is ever seen in the Mediterranean. Being here means I can meet a buyer or an owner for an international broker within days, and that I watch one of the more interesting corners of the market from inside it.