The used-boat market has no buyer's side. We're building it.
Roughly 858,000 used boats change hands in the United States every year — nearly four out of five boats sold. For cars, that market has Kelley Blue Book, Carfax, and decades of pricing infrastructure. For boats, there is effectively nothing: no trusted value reference, no history reports worth the name, and listings written entirely by the selling side.
Every party in a used-boat transaction is paid by the seller or paid on the sale — the marketplace, the broker, the dealer. The buyer, making one of the largest discretionary purchases of their life, goes in alone.
BoatVerdict is the counterweight. We sell one thing — the Deal Report — directly to the buyer, for a flat $49. No listing fees, no dealer relationships, no commission on whether the sale happens. When our report says a boat is overpriced by $22,000, nothing about our business suffers if you walk away. That's the entire design.
How the reports are made
Underneath every report sits the data layer we build in public: 875,000+ US state vessel registrations, the complete USCG and CPSC recall record, 16,000+ manufacturers via Coast Guard HIN data, and a hand-authored model corpus covering the most-traded used boats in America — price behavior, known failure points, and resale character, written and maintained by analysts, not scraped or generated.
Each Deal Report is then written for the specific boat: the actual listing, the actual engine and hours, comparable boats on the market right now, and a negotiation script you can use the same day. Where data is missing, the report says so plainly — and tells you what to demand from the seller before money moves.
What we're not
Not a marketplace. Not a broker. Not a lead-generation funnel for dealers. And not a substitute for a marine survey — a report tells you whether a boat is worth surveying at the asking price; the surveyor tells you what the hull actually looks like up close. Used together, they're the strongest position a boat buyer has ever had.