About Yachts & Bids

Yachts & Bids is an online boat auction for the British Columbia coast. A seller lists a boat, the auction runs for seven days, and real bidders compete for it. No broker booth, no six-month sit on the market, no "is it still available?" tire-kickers.

We're pre-launch and starting where we know the water — Vancouver, Victoria, the Sunshine Coast, Nanaimo, and the Gulf Islands. We're accepting boats now. We'll say this plainly, because honesty is the whole point of the place: we have not completed an auction yet. No member counts, no dollars-sold, no sell-through rate to wave around. What we have is a model built so the first seller and the first buyer both come out ahead — and the model is spelled out below, not buried in a highlight reel.

Who it's for

This is built for Pacific Northwest boat people — the owner who knows their engine hours by heart, and the buyer who'd rather read a real condition report than haggle in a parking lot.

Our launch cohort is trailerable-to-mid-size powerboats: the bowriders, center consoles, cruisers, and aluminum fishing boats that actually change hands on this coast every season. If your boat lives on a trailer in the driveway or on a finger at the marina, you're who we built this for. We're not chasing superyachts — we're after the everyday PNW boat that should sell clean and fast instead of sitting half a year.

Why sell and buy here

Every advantage below is a fact you can check, not a feeling we want you to have.

• Free to list. You keep 100% of the hammer price. No listing fee, no seller commission. A broker takes roughly 10% — that's $20,000 out of a $200,000 sale. We take zero from the seller.
• The buyer's fee is capped — 5%, minimum $250, maximum $10,000 CAD. It can't balloon on a high-value boat. On a $40,000 boat the buyer pays $2,000; on a $400,000 boat, still $10,000. That's the whole platform fee.
• $0 of the purchase price ever touches Yachts & Bids. The money moves buyer-to-seller through a licensed marine escrow & title partner — never through us, and never directly into a stranger's account. That single step stops the most common way private boat deals get robbed: wire fraud.
• A survey and sea-trial window before the money moves. After a buyer wins, there's a structured window to get a marine survey and sea trial done. If a material, undisclosed defect turns up, the buyer can walk and the $1,000 deposit is refunded. The auction is binding — but it's binding on an honest boat.
• Honest "Known Flaws" on every listing. Every listing carries a Known Flaws section — that's the rule, not a maybe. The soft transom, the blistered gelcoat, the tired impeller goes on the page before a single bid. We'd rather lose a sale than launder a problem.
• Listings written by hand, with you. We don't auto-generate a description from a spec sheet. You shoot your own photos with our boat photo guide, and we write the listing together — make, year, hours, condition, and the warts.
• Seven days, not six months. A broker listing can sit on the market for half a year. Our auction runs seven days, with an anti-snipe soft-close: a late bid extends the clock, so nobody steals the boat in the final second.
• BC-simple paperwork. Selling a pleasure craft here is genuinely simpler than in the US. Most boats just need a Pleasure Craft Licence (PCL — about $24 for five years as of 2025; transfer is signing the back, and the buyer files within 90 days). The Canadian Register of Vessels (about $250) only applies to commercial, mortgaged, or foreign-travel boats. The lien check is a PPSA search. Budget for about 12% PST on a BC private sale. We walk you through the exact steps in Selling a boat in BC.

Who's behind it

There is no celebrity host here. No catchphrase, no YouTube channel, no host whose face is the brand.

What there is: a local BC operator who reviews every boat by hand. We read every submission, write every listing with the seller, and reply within two business days — from a real person, not a ticket queue. We turn boats away; a marketplace that lists everything is just Craigslist with a logo. We're starting small and on purpose, on a coast we actually boat on, so the first listings are ones we'd stake the name on.

How this differs from a broker

A traditional broker is slow, expensive, and gatekept. A 7-day auction flips all three: the market sets the price instead of one broker's guess, every bidder has put down a refundable $1,000 deposit so the "tire-kicker" emails disappear, and the close runs through a licensed escrow partner instead of a private trust account you have to take on faith.

And one deliberate difference from the car-auction playbook: we don't require exclusivity. You can keep your boat listed elsewhere, and you can walk away anytime before the auction goes live. A marketplace should earn the listing every week — not lock it up.

Start here

• Selling? Submit your boat — four fields, and a real person reads every one.
• Curious what it's worth first? Get a free What's my boat worth? estimate before you commit to anything.

Browsing and watching are always free. A refundable $1,000 deposit only kicks in when you're ready to bid.