Half the new ARC boats are multihulls — and the side of the trade I keep underweighting
If the new-build mix has been roughly half multihulls for years and the used market hasn't fully caught up, the resale math on a 2028 catamaran purchase looks different than the brokers are pricing today.
The first time I read the World Cruising Club's fleet breakdown, I scrolled past it. The second time I went back and stared at it for a while.
Multihulls are roughly 20% of the overall ARC fleet — that part feels right, walking the docks in Las Palmas. But of newly-launched boats in the rally, multihulls have been about half of the total since at least 2019. In ARC 2024, 45 catamarans and trimarans crossed, including two brand-new builds (a C-Cat 38 and an MC75) that were essentially making their debut on the start line. The average age of an ARC monohull is somewhere around 14 years. The average age of an ARC multihull is about two.
That's the number I keep coming back to. Two years.
I am not in the market for a brand-new cat. The 50-foot cat we're researching for the family circumnavigation will almost certainly be a five-to-ten-year-old hull — somewhere in the Saba 50, Leopard 50, Lagoon 50, Outremer 4X/45 range. New is somebody else's problem. The depreciation curve on an Outremer 5X in years one through three is brutal, and I'd rather have somebody else absorb that pencil mark.
But the fleet-mix shift matters anyway. Today's new-boat buyers become tomorrow's used-boat sellers. If the people writing $1.2M checks for new Outremer 52s and FP Aura 51s in 2024 and 2025 are roughly half of the new tradewinds fleet, then by 2030 — when I'd actually be writing my own check — the used market for fifteen-year-old 50-foot catamarans will be deeper and more competitive than the YachtWorld listings I'm staring at today suggest. More inventory means more comps. More comps means less broker leverage on price. Good for the buyer.
The other side of the trade is what worries me more.
My base case for the circumnavigation is roughly five years aboard, returning sometime in 2032 or 2033. At that point I'm a seller in a market where eight-to-twelve-year-old production cats — exactly my hull — are the abundant inventory, and the new-boat half of the ARC line is some 2031 vintage I haven't met yet. The brutal years on the depreciation curve are the ones I'd be sitting through. Not catastrophic. Cruising cats from the 2020–2025 vintage will probably retain value better than the 2010–2015 cohort did, partly because lithium house banks, electric drives, and serial production have raised the floor on what "modern" means. But real.
So when I model the ownership math on the worksheet — purchase 2028, sell 2033, five years of family use — I've started running the resale assumption at 55–60% of purchase rather than the 65–70% the brokers like to quote. On a $700K boat that's roughly $70K of difference. Not a dealbreaker. But it's the kind of number I want in the spreadsheet before the survey, not after.
The half-of-new-boats stat is real and it's been steady for years. I think the next five years tilt it more, not less. Which means the boat I buy will probably be cheaper to acquire than my model says, and harder to sell than my model says.
I'm fine with that trade. I just want to be honest about both sides of it.
