The Earls Court Boat Auction has been extremely popular with 100 boats up for auction throughout the show. Daily registering and bidding on the boatbid auction pod at stand H90 starts every day at 1000 and closes at 1700. Each day there are 20 boats up for auction, ranging from small family cruisers to a mock Spanish galleon. There’s even a British America’s Cup (GBR70), which raced in New Zealand in 2002, up for grabs tomorrow afternoon.

Neil Chapman, Chairman of Boatshed and founder of Boatbid, talking enthusiastically about the response their first show auction said: “We’ve had an overwhelming response to the auction, and had to reduce the original 300 boats to 100 for the show. We have an interesting variety of boats going through with attractive reserve prices. It’s the first time we’ve used the technology and it’s working extremely well. The feedback has also been excellent. Yesterday we had 80 bids and we’ve got six of those boats very close to their reserves.”

But according to Chapman, boat auctioning is a long process and can take up to eight weeks for the deal to be clinched. After the bidding closes it’s the brokers’ job to try to finish the deal by negotiating with the owner on the reserve price. “Selling a boat isn’t an instantaneous thing. They don’t come to the stand with the money; our business is all about process. They see it on the website, they speak to the broker and then, after the auction closes, they may want it surveyed. All of our boats are sold subject to a standard contract which enables the purchaser to have the boat independently surveyed and also to potentially sea-trialled.”

Chapman says that tomorrow’s boat line up is really interesting so if you fancy having a look at what’s on offer or registering, either go to the website boatbid.com or, better still, head to the stand (H90) where you’ll be able to meet the team, brokers and find out more details about your dream boat and even take the plunge!