You’ve Chartered Everything. Now What?
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
For a new generation of first-time owners, a decade spent chartering may be more useful than a decade spent working up through yacht ownership. Boatsters Black is seeing that experience translate into some decidedly ambitious first moves.
There is an old idea in yachting that ownership has a ladder. Buy something manageable. Learn a few expensive lessons. Go bigger. Learn some more. Eventually, perhaps, you arrive at 60, 70 or 80 meters with enough scar tissue to know what you’re doing.
Charter has rather messed with that logic. Today’s serial charterer may have spent a decade aboard some of the world’s best yachts before buying one. They know what an exceptional crew feels like. They know whether they prefer breakfast on the aft deck or never eat there at all. Their children may have grown up jumping from swim platforms in Greece and the Caribbean. They have strong opinions about gyms, tenders, noise, mattresses and the curious tendency for certain spectacularly expensive spaces to remain almost entirely unused.
They may be a first-time owner. They are not necessarily new to yachts.
Boatsters Black knows something about this particular leap. The brokerage recently sold the first hull of the Nuvolari Lenard NL 52 Plus to a first-time owner and represented, alongside Bjorn International Brokerage, the buyer of an Amels 80 scheduled for delivery in 2029 — another first-time owner with extensive charter experience.
An 80-meter, 2,175GT yacht is quite an opening move. For Boatsters Black founder and CEO Nick Gelevert, however, the interesting number isn’t 80. “Length is a fairly crude starting point for a conversation about how somebody intends to live on the water,” he says. “I want to know who will be aboard, how often, and where. Do three generations of the family travel together? Does the owner want everyone congregating in one part of the yacht, or enough separation to disappear for half a day?”
This is where charter becomes useful reconnaissance. Spend enough time chartering and patterns emerge. The enormous beach club that looked irresistible in photographs may barely be visited. An ostensibly less important outdoor dining area becomes the center of family life. A client who thought speed mattered discovers they prefer spending three days at anchor. Another realizes the yacht is effectively a launchpad for diving, kitesurfing and exploration. A good charter broker notices these things, too.
“A yacht can look perfect on paper and still be completely wrong for a particular client,” says Nerma Hecimovic, Senior Central Agency Manager at Boatsters Black, which represents a fleet of more than 25 charter yachts. “The personality of the crew, how the spaces work when guests are aboard and the type of charter a yacht is particularly good at can matter far more than another few meters or gross tons.”
That knowledge becomes considerably more valuable when the conversation turns from chartering somebody else’s yacht to creating your own. There is a temptation to build the greatest-hits album. Take the beach club from one yacht, the cinema from another, add the toys the children loved last summer, make the owner’s suite larger and throw in another few hundred gross tons because, well, you can. This is where somebody needs to spoil the fun.
“One of the things chartering teaches clients extremely well is what they enjoy,” says Gelevert. “Our job is to work out how much of that should influence what they own. The two aren’t always the same.”
And at the upper end of the market, there is an awful lot of fun available to spoil. The technical possibilities have expanded dramatically. Shipyards have accumulated experience at scale, and today’s owner can contemplate levels of range, autonomy, toy-carrying capacity and lifestyle infrastructure that belonged to a very small club not so long ago. More choice should make things easier. It doesn’t.
There is always another tender to carry. Another deck to add. Another meter of beam to find. Greater volume creates possibilities, but it also creates complexity, crew requirements and cost. The question is rarely whether something can be incorporated. At this level, it usually can. The better question is whether anyone will use it. There is another reason this matters now. Information itself is becoming cheap.
Nearly every yacht worth knowing about can be found online. Market intelligence is becoming faster, too. Boatsters Black has developed Yacht Album, an AI-powered platform that aggregates market information and searches for on- and off-market opportunities in seconds. Gelevert is enthusiastic about it precisely because he doesn’t think technology is the clever part.
“If technology can do the searching faster and better, let it,” he says. “Finding the yacht is one thing. Knowing whether somebody should buy it is another.” That distinction becomes acute during a new build project.
The yacht business likes the moment a contract is signed. Photographs are taken. The length, gross tonnage, designer and delivery date are announced. Champagne may become involved. Then everyone has to work together for two to four years. Gelevert believes that reality should change the way a deal is negotiated. “I will push hard for my client,” he says. “But I’ve seen negotiations where somebody becomes so focused on winning that they lose sight of the key relationships they need. A good deal has to leave everybody able to work together the following morning.”
It is an unfashionably measured position in a world rather fond of talking about dealmaking. It also explains why Boatsters Black will sometimes recommend no yacht at all. A build opportunity can be excellent and still be wrong. A yacht can represent good value and remain the wrong yacht. And sometimes another summer spent chartering Corsica, Amalfi or the Greek islands will tell a prospective owner more about what they need than six months studying general arrangements. Postponing a commission is not the obvious brokerage business model.
Gelevert sees it differently. Boatsters Black is entering its eleventh year, and some relationships have already traveled from charter to purchase and into new build. The transaction, in other words, is not necessarily the destination. “We want to grow, but I have no ambition to be the biggest brokerage in the world,” he says. “I would much rather be one of the most trusted. If somebody calls us for the next yacht, and the one after that, we’ve done something right.” Perhaps that is the more useful definition of experience. Not how many yachts somebody has owned, but how much they have learned from the ones they have spent time on.
And occasionally, that makes an 80-meter yacht a perfectly reasonable place to start.
