Volume Doubles, Clocks Run Longer

Seventy-two trawlers changed hands between July and September — more than double the same quarter a year earlier. The median boat took 173 days on market to get there, longer than the 115 days recorded in Q3 2025.

The headline number for the trawler segment in the third quarter of 2026 is 72 — the count of boats that closed. A year earlier, the same three months produced 28. Against the trailing twelve months, which recorded 261 sales, Q3 alone accounted for better than a quarter of the year’s activity. Whatever else is true of this market, transactions are getting done in volume.

Market Overview

Seventy-two closings sat alongside 94 active listings at the end of the period and 18 withdrawals during it. That is a roughly balanced book: supply standing at about one and a third quarters of absorption at the current clip, with a modest number of owners choosing to step away rather than keep adjusting. The withdrawals are worth watching — 18 boats pulled against 72 sold is a meaningful fraction of sellers who concluded the price they wanted and the price on offer were not going to meet.

This is a brokered segment almost without exception. Exactly one of the 72 sales was for-sale-by-owner. Buyers in this category expect survey coordination, documentation and escrow handled professionally, and sellers are overwhelmingly structuring their sales accordingly.

Sold and active boats look like each other on the tape measure: median sold length 43 feet, median active length 42 feet. The inventory on the water matches the inventory going out the door, which argues the pipeline is well-matched to demand rather than clogged with the wrong product.

Seventy-two closings against twenty-eight a year earlier. The question this quarter is not whether boats are selling — it is who is buying, and at what.

Pricing

Confirmed prices are available for 27 of the 72 sales, and every pricing figure below describes that subset only. Within it, the median was $162,500 and the average $669,786 — a gap of more than four times, created by a range that runs from $15,000 to $9,600,000. Use the median. The average in this segment is a single superyacht-scale transaction wearing a statistic’s clothing.

The distribution of those 27 priced sales is heavily weighted to the entry and mid tiers: 14 sold below $200,000; 6 between $200,000 and $350,000; one between $350,000 and $500,000; 3 between $500,000 and $750,000; one between $750,000 and $1,000,000; and 2 above $1,000,000. The thin middle — a single boat in the $350–500k band — is a count, not a trend, and should not be read as a hole in demand.

Across the priced sales, the median closing figure landed at 88.3% of the final asking price. That is what happened on those boats, not a discount to budget for. With 27 data points spanning $15,000 to $9.6 million, the gap between ask and sale on any individual boat will owe far more to how that boat was priced on day one than to any segment-wide rule.

On the asking side, the current book shows a median of $199,500 and an average of $327,729, with 50 of 94 listings priced under $200,000 and 18 more between $200,000 and $350,000. Only 4 active boats carry seven-figure asks, topping out at $3,199,000 — well below the quarter’s top sale.

Not one of the 72 sales closed inside 30 days. In this segment, patience is part of the process, not a symptom.

Market Velocity

The median sale took 173 days on market and the average 189. Both are longer than the comparison points: the same quarter a year ago produced a 173-day-shorter picture at 115 days across 28 sales, and the trailing twelve months sit at 127 days across 261. Q3 2026 closed slower than both of those benchmarks — while closing nearly three times as many boats as the year-ago quarter.

The distribution tells you where the weight sits. No sale closed in under 30 days. Twelve closed between 30 and 90 days, 25 between 90 and 180, 31 between 180 and 365, and 4 beyond a year. In other words, 35 of 72 sales — just under half — needed six months or more. The quick-flip outcome simply was not available in this segment this quarter, at any price point.

Current inventory mirrors the pattern: the median active listing has been on market 173 days, identical to the median sold figure. Today’s unsold boats are not conspicuously stale relative to what has been transacting — they are sitting right at the point where comparable boats found buyers.

Size & Builders

Length distribution across all 72 sales is barbelled. The largest single cluster is under 38 feet with 17 boats, closely followed by 41–44 feet with 15, and then — notably — 60 feet and above with 14. The 45–49 foot band contributed 10, the 38–40 foot band 9, and 50–59 feet just 7. Both ends of the market are active; the upper-middle, 50 to 59 feet, moved the fewest hulls.

Builder representation is fragmented, with no yard accounting for more than 5 of the 72 sales. Azimut and Sea Ray led with 5 each, followed by Beneteau and Leopard at 4, then Bertram, Carver, Mainship and Prestige at 3, and Defever and Formula at 2. The spread reflects how broadly buyers in this category shop — classic displacement names such as Mainship and Defever trade alongside European flybridge and multihull platforms, and buyers are cross-shopping across those lines rather than anchoring on a single builder.