The 12% gap between Lagoon and Outremer asking-to-sale prices

I started tracking listings on YachtWorld and Boats.com about six months ago — every catamaran 45 to 55 feet that hit the market and every one that came off it. Manual spreadsheet, nothing fancy. The point was to calibrate my own price expectations before we make an offer on the 50-foot cat we're researching. What I found surprised me enough that I want to write it down before I forget it.

Across the 47 cat sales I could match (asking → sale → days on market), the average asking-to-sale haircut on a Lagoon 450 / 50 / 52 was 12 to 15%. On Outremer 45/49/51, it was 5 to 6%. Average days on market: Lagoons sat for 180 to 220 days, Outremers moved in 60 to 90.

On a $750K Lagoon listing that is $90,000 between asking and what the boat actually trades at. On a $1.1M Lagoon 52 it is $130,000+.

The number that won't leave me alone is the 12% spread on the Lagoons. Add 8% broker, survey, delivery, commissioning — and the all-in cost of getting a five-year-old Lagoon 50 onto your line is meaningfully different from what the listing suggests.

The cleanest explanation is just supply. There are simply more Lagoons in circulation. Lagoon has been cranking out the 450/50/52 for years; Outremer hand-builds maybe 25 to 30 boats a year across the whole range. Thin supply compresses bid-ask. I get that.

But that is not the whole story. When I called three brokers I trust — two who specialize in performance cats, one who moves volume Lagoon and Fountaine Pajot — they all said roughly the same thing: production cats coming out of charter fleets carry a discount that is hard to underwrite. You don't know how the boat was sailed. You don't know how aggressively the rig was loaded. You don't know what the rebed schedule actually looked like under absentee management. The discount is buyers pricing in unknowns.

For a family planning to live aboard for five years with four kids, not flip in two, that distinction matters more than the average shopper would weight it. A boat that came out of charter at four years old has spent maybe 1,200 to 1,800 engine hours under bareboat skippers I have never met. A privately owned Outremer at four years old has typically done 400 to 700 hours in conditions an owner-operator picked.

The other thing I noticed: the Lagoon discount narrows substantially on hulls with documented private ownership from new. A 2019 Lagoon 50 with original owner and a sail-bag full of receipts trades closer to 6 to 8% off asking, in line with Outremers. So it is not the brand — it is the provenance.

What I would actually buy with my own money is starting to look like: a four-to-seven-year-old privately owned cat (Outremer, Catana, Fountaine Pajot Astrea, or a clean-history Lagoon 50/52) with full service records, ideally one owner. Skip the ex-charter discount. Pay closer to asking. The economics work because the carrying cost of unknown maintenance debt — tank gaskets, rigging fatigue, hidden water in the headliner — is almost always larger than the price savings.

I am going to keep the spreadsheet running. If the spread compresses to under 8% on Lagoons over the next two quarters, that probably means broker inventory is clearing and we are closer to a bottom. If it widens past 15%, charter operators are likely dumping fleet at year-end and the right play is to wait.

A few more quarters of data and I will know whether this is a real signal or just my sample being small. Either way, the worksheet is open and I am updating it on Sunday mornings.