Concluding our Adventure.



September 21st - The Beginning of the Fall.
...... and the Beginning of the End.


As our adventure drew to a close we seriously thought about keeping CLAIRE JUSTINE, we even talked about finding some partners and going into shared ownership. But deep down we knew that, for us, the sensible thing to do was sell her. So we started the.........


The Selling Process

Because of our experiences in March we had a good feel for the market but still had to find a buyer willing to pay our price.

Obviously, we wanted to get as much as we could but decided that if we cleared £36,000 we would be satisfied. This would be £6,000 less than we paid and would work out to an average of $215 a week; or about 20% of the hire rate for a top quality boat.

During our last month of cruising we stopped by a number of brokerages that were on our "preferred" list and discussed commission rates and asking price. We also placed an advertisement in the October issue of Waterways World and listed CJ for sale at an optimistic asking price of £45,000.

The advantages of selling through a broker were:-

they would handle all the advertising and marketing;

they would moor the boat at their marina without cost; and

all we had to do was take the boat to them when we were ready to go home.

The disadvantage was the commission but we discovered that in quite a few cases the standard rate of 7 to 10% was negotiable. CJ would be selling in the upper price range so most were willing to discuss a sliding scale commission, however, one brokerage refused to budge from a flat 10% commission so we quickly dropped them from our list.

Another area for negotiation was the asking price. Most places had no problem listing CJ at £42,000 and a couple of them suggested a higher figure; however this was not always the case. Three locations we really liked were Cowroast at Tring; Alvechurch at Gayton and Whilton Marina near Daventry. After a cursory evaluation, Cowroast told us they would only list her if we agreed to an asking price of £35,000, meaning we would be looking at around £33,000 net. Alvechurch did not seem very interested even though they were advertising "Boats required for sale on brokerage"; maybe CJ was too close to the market for their own top quality new boats. Whilton Marina were very accommodating and, after looking the boat over, suggested an initial asking price of £44,000 they also agreed to a very reasonable sliding scale commission rate with a low 2% rate on the higher tier.

We were straight forward with Whilton and told them we were trying to sell privately but not having much success. We talked to them on 20th October and said we would return at the end of the month if we had not found a buyer.



We never made back to Whilton Marina because ..........

Eight days later we had completed The Sale

Preface ...|... Acquiring our Narrow Boat ...or..
Cruising the Waterways

John.....The Canaloholic in Reno.