“The potential YachtWorld lawsuit is just a symptom. The real problem? An industry that taught buyers to ask: ‘Is this boat still for sale?’”

The first question buyers ask Ask any broker. The most common enquiry does not start with condition, history, or even price. It starts with: “Is this boat still for sale?”

That question tells you everything. Buyers have been trained not to trust what they see. Too many listings are stale. Too many duplicates are scattered across half a dozen sites. Too many ghosts were never real in the first place. The industry has normalised the absurd: a customer clicks on a boat and their first thought is maybe it does not exist.

Imagine Amazon working like that. You see a 60-inch TV, click the button, and then have to phone someone to check if it is actually in stock. Nobody would tolerate it. Yet in boats, we have lived with it for years.

Aggregators and dependence This problem is tied to the rise of aggregators: websites that do not sell boats themselves, but gather listings from brokers and sellers into one big shop window. Think YachtWorld, RightBoat, TheYachtMarket, and Boats.com.

Aggregators make their money by selling advertising, so their model depends on one thing: volume. The more listings they show, the bigger their numbers look, and the more they can charge advertisers. Which is why their marketing always stresses size: 50,000 boats, 100,000 boats, “the largest selection online.”

To be clear, this is not about criticising any single company. These are industry-wide patterns that affect many platforms and the brokers who use them.

In my last piece, I wrote about the potential legal case being brought against YachtWorld in the United States. Brokers there are calling it a monopoly, pointing to fee hikes of more than 200 percent. But the truth is more complicated. YachtWorld did not invent its dominance overnight. Brokers themselves built that dependence by putting all their listings there, year after year.

And here is the irony. Part of the reason they did it is because the rest of the web was worse. If you are constantly asking “is this still for sale?”, then even an imperfect monopoly looks like stability. The case against YachtWorld may expose pricing practices, but the deeper story is about bad data and the habits it creates.

Why the question exists Those impressive-sounding inventory numbers hide a truth: a large proportion of the listings are not real. Some are sold. Some are duplicated multiple times. Some are pure invention. Research and experience suggest as many as 40 percent of the boats on certain aggregator sites are stale or ghosts.

Why ghost listings appear:

Lead bait for sellers A broker wants to look like the go-to expert for a particular brand or model. He might create two, three, maybe half a dozen ghost listings. That is enough to give the impression he is regularly handling that type of boat. An owner browsing the market sees this and thinks: “This broker clearly shifts these, he must be the right person to sell mine.”

Lead bait for buyers A ghost listing tempts a buyer to enquire. The broker can then reply: “That one is gone, but let me show you something similar.” A handful of ghosts can generate a steady stream of leads.

Inflating presence Even a small number of ghost listings pads out a broker’s profile and makes their pipeline look stronger. Aggregators benefit too, because every extra listing makes their site appear more valuable to advertisers.

And because aggregators are paid on clicks, not sales, there is no incentive to clean up. A dead listing still drives traffic.

The cost of bad data Ghosts and stale listings do not just look messy. They waste time.

They waste the buyer’s time: chasing phantoms, sending enquiries that go nowhere.

They waste the seller’s time: believing their boat is “everywhere,” when in reality it is diluted by junk.

They waste the broker’s time: sifting through duplicate or pointless enquiries instead of closing deals.

At the core, both parties want the same thing: one wants to buy a boat, the other wants to sell one. Everything else should be built to make that process quicker and clearer. Bad data does the opposite.

The lesson we have learned That frustration has shaped the way I have always thought about Boatshed. From the start, we built listings around the sales cycle, because the chaos of ghosts and stale ads was never good enough.

-A boat is not visible until the listing is complete.

- It is only "live" once ready all specification is QC checked.

- It is "under offer" only when a contract and deposit are in place.

- It is "sold" as soon as the deal closes, then left visible for two days before being moved to a 30,000-strong archive clearly marked "not for sale".

No padding. No zombies. Just a clear line between what is for sale and what is not. Not because it was a clever marketing play, but because wasting the customer’s time is the worst habit our industry ever picked up.

Engagement versus volume Aggregators measure themselves by how many boats they carry. The better measure is how buyers actually engage with each listing.

If a platform boasts two million visits and 70,000 boats, that is fewer than 30 views per boat. Factor in duplicates and ghosts, and the real figure is even lower. That is not engagement. It is noise.

When you track Traffic Intensity: views per active listing, the picture changes. Fewer boats, higher engagement, real attention. That is the metric that matters, because engagement sells boats. Big numbers just sell adverts.

Where this is heading The next chapter is not about who has the most listings. It is about who has the cleanest data.

As AI-driven search becomes the default, duplication and ghosts will be exposed instantly. Large language models do not care how many boats you say you have. They care which ones are real, fresh, and canonical. The winners will be the platforms whose data machines can trust.

That is the purpose of Boatsales.ai: an open, structured, machine-readable index of boats. Listings tied to the sales cycle, designed for search engines, recommendation systems, and AI tools to surface without duplication or distortion. Where YachtWorld entrenched dependence, the aim here is openness.

Closing thought The YachtWorld case may be about fees and market power, but it also points to a deeper problem: an industry that let bad data become normal. Brokers fed the system, aggregators amplified it, and buyers paid the price.

The lesson is simple: stop wasting the customer’s time. Because in the end, that is what bad data really does.

Big numbers sell adverts. Engagement sells boats. And in the future, visibility will belong to whoever looks after their data — which is exactly what we are building into Boatsales.ai.

Neil

The observations in this article reflect industry-wide practices and challenges. Figures cited are based on publicly available research and sector commentary, not audits of any individual company. No specific business is being accused of misrepresentation; the focus is on systemic issues affecting buyers, sellers, and brokers across the marine sector.

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