If you want to talk about a hard sell, talk about selling boats. These high-ticket items are a huge investment of time, money and dedication, even for the wealthy. And for the mega yacht crowd, it’s even more complicated, having to deal with crews, docking fees and security. It’s akin to running a small business. Still, many are attracted to it because of the glamour and the adventure this category has to offer.

Murray Lord, a founding partner of Wellington Yacht Partners, knows this well. He has been a broker of luxury yachts for around a decade. Originating from New Zealand, Lord has been around boats nearly his whole life—he was a boat captain himself for a while—and now connects well-to-do clients with the boats of their dreams as a yacht broker. He knows the market in and out, from wind-powered vessels to floating “second homes.”

He spent many years working on different yachts at sea, before starting out in sales in 1996, selling real estate. But it wasn’t long before he was back in the boating scene again in 1999, selling the very thing he loves. Luxury CE spoke to Murray about the art of selling luxury yachts and how he works in this exciting and dynamic market.

Luxury CE: How would you describe the yacht market right now?

Murray Lord: I think boats in the last three or four years have been overpriced. The Russians were heavily in the market but they had over inflated it, paying extraordinary amounts for boats because they had to get rid of some money. And with what’s happened [with the economy], things have just dropped right out of the market. Twenty-five of the wealthiest Russian’s have lost billions of dollars—it’s a staggering amount of money—and they are just not as liquid as they were before. The current market has brought prices into a more realistic line. I just bid on a boat in Monaco for $11.5 million. The owner and the broker said, “You know what, forget it. We want $13.9. And you know, four weeks they called me up and said, “Is your guy still available for 11.5?” So people are getting more realistic with their prices.

LCE: How different is selling in this category? Did you change your sales technique after leaving real estate?

ML: You do change the way you sell. In selling real estate, you’re basically selling what people need. I’m selling fun. I sell fun to people who need to get out of their stressful lives, go to the Caribbean and live a lifestyle, or enjoy part of a lifestyle. At the end of the day, they really don’t need it. And so you have to make the whole buying process enjoyable. You have to be honest. These buyers are pretty savvy business people and you have to give it to them pretty straight. But you have to make it fun 
for them.

The experience of “getting it” is important. If you’re my client, I don’t want to sell you just one boat, I want to keep you as a lifetime customer. So when you have a great time, I’m going to get a call and you’ll tell me “this is the most fantastic thing ever.” When you are having a bad experience, then I want you to call me up and say, “how can we fix this?” It’s not just a one-off thing; I want it to be a lifelong relationship. So I think that is the philosophy that I have, and that we have at Wellington partners. It’s the relationship that we are developing with these buyers, not just, “Get them in and get them out.”

LCE: How do you network in the yachting world? Is it any differnt than anywhere else?

ML: I do it mostly through clients to whom I’ve already sold boats. The client you sold your boat to is your best referral. We also get referrals from captains, or from other friends that know people in the market for a boat. A friend of mine, while at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. boat show, sent me three clients that were looking for seven-figure boats because they know me and trust me. I get a lot of referrals that way. And then we have the normal advertising or boating magazines. People see a boat in the magazine and they call us up, and several other brokers. That means it’s my job is to establish a relationship better than the other brokers. Wes also advertise through the Web.

LCE: Do your buyers require special attention?

ML: Yes, they want to be looked after. They don’t necessarily want to be wined and dined, although a lot of people do that. I deal with a lot of New Zealanders and Australians and they are very practical. We’ll get on a boat and, maybe it’s a great boat, but it’s not really what they want and it’s not going to do what they want it to do. So, you’ve got to tell it to them the way it is. You tell them, “This is a great boat, but it’s not really what you want, so let’s get off and get onto the next yacht.” It’s not like showing ice cream to kids and they don’t care what flavor it is—they just know they want one. These people hang onto these boats for a long time and they enjoy it.

LCE: What mistakes do you think people make when they start selling in this high-end area?

ML: Pricing things too high and not taking the first offer: nine out of ten times the first offer you get for a boat is the best offer. A great example is what happened in Monaco. [The seller and his broker] got an offer of $11.5 million, they didn’t take it and now they’ve spent $250,000 bringing the boat from Europe to here (the U.S.), and now they’re chasing me, trying to get that same offer.

LCE: What trends are you seeing in technology on yachts? What are boat owners buying?

ML: I was just talking to a boat manufacturer in Italy today and the allowance [for one vessel] they had for audio and navigation equipment was 630,000 Euro [close to $800,000]. That’s a lot of money and that’s a lot of televisions and entertainment systems. And the other thing is they are getting very security conscious with things like night vision. With the pirate attacks in Somalia and the pirate attacks in the Mediterranean last summer, people are very security conscious. So security issues are high.
And they love high-end audio and video, as well as home theaters. You walk onto a boat now and everyone has got a 52-inch flat screen—or three. And of course you have your Crestron systems, where you can push a button and bring up 500 movies.

LCE: Are there enough A/V and security contractors out there? What are you thoughts on them?

ML: There are enough of them out there, but I think the key thing is finding good ones. It’s the same as any business, finding people that are reliable are turning up when they say they will turn up, and do a good job. That’s a big issue. We steer clients to people we know and trust. We don’t want someone to buy a multimillion-dollar boat and then say to him, “You go find your own audio/video guy or electronics guy.” We try to send clients to people we know will do a good job, because at the end of the day if he comes back and says, “those guys were terrible,” he’s mad at us. You try and keep pretty close tabs on your client because there’s 10 other brokers stepping on your heels trying to get this guys business.

LCE: How do you get to know your clients?

ML: It’s about face time. I had a client from New Zealand fly up for a show and I met him at 9:00 in the morning at his hotel. I sat down with him for an hour and we went out to the show to look at boats. We said goodbye that night after a quick 30-minute dinner after we were looking at boats until 10:00 at night. We spent two hours on one boat just looking around.

Then it’s following up with the client. You have to get back with them right away; they love that. They want to know that they are being serviced. That’s a big thing with them. They like the attention and they like being treated well.  •