Trying to buy can be so frustrating...

Jujupilote wrote:

I saw that A36 for sale
https://www.aviation-pilote.com/avion-beechcraft-36-bonanza-a36/

It made me dream a little, but I guess it would be more useful to you

This one is here:
http://www.planecheck.com?ent=da&id=42001 planecheck_F_GNAG_42001_pdf

Huge discount versus the plancheck price… Actually 90K is the price with fresh engine. Engine is 2019h, Conti said 1900h/12y.
Actually I am is a process of dreaming to buy a plane, but it is not the time for now. I would be up for a twin comanche turbo…

One would think it is a buyer’s market but lots of people find buying frustrating.

See e.g. here, here etc.

I think a lot of it is that many people are struggling in their lives with communication (and probably just struggling keeping all the life’s balls in the air) and always have done but nowadays in the “instant communication age” we expect responsiveness, decent behaviour, etc.

It’s probably just like internet dating There are fairly obvious procedures which minimise time wasting, and they start with being really hard-nosed and not bothering with poor or suspect communicators. Clearly, what is needed is a version of Tinder but for aircraft

More seriously, I think that quality holds its price, but there is not much of it around. Much of the GA fleet is in a poor condition, with successive owners having struggled to hang in there, financially, dealing with difficult maintenance companies, etc. What will ensure that you never find a plane is if you look for a good condition one but want to pay the price of a poor condition one.

BTW if you are posting Planecheck advert links, note that these will likely be dead by the time someone reads them in the near future. Please use the site here to produce a PDF and drop it into your post. Normally I do this but it can take a lot of my time.

I hate to say this but the seller is probably just an idiot and you should move on.

I am sure I am teaching you to suck eggs but a good % of the human race are not direct people who know what they are doing in life. These types just stumble, fumble, lurch from one crisis to the next, live off favours as far as poss, somehow making enough money out of something to live and maybe buy a plane, while driving everybody they deal with up the wall, by reading only the first line of any email. They are usually borderline-illiterate and thus resist having to communicate properly because they fear somebody will take the p1ss out of them. Way too many idioms there for me to put in urbandictionary links

A funny story is here.

Would you pay a deposit prior to having a signed contract?

I paid a deposit on the one the guy changed his mind on, on the back of having viewed the plane, agreed a price and signed a Letter of Intent by both parties. Once he went radio silence after the pre-buy inspection, I thought hard about how I would get my deposit back. It is not easy taking someone to court in a different country. I am not sure I would pay a deposit again.

My two data points:

Back in 2004 we bought a 177RG. BTW, a great all around advanced if not complex SEP. We spent six months searching including trips to Sweden, Denmark, Michigan and Arkansas where we inspected and sampled different aircraft before we found our steed. The purchase process itself was thus a significant fraction of the acquisition price.

After six years of searching, in 2016 we acquired a beautiful P210. We had sampled aircraft in Holland, Germany, UK, California and Nevada throughout the years but it was very difficult to find the right one.

Part of the issue is also the scarcity of well looked after aircraft: if someone invests a lot in looking after their aircraft then the motivations to sell are typically not the usual market-driven ones and hence price is not low. Vref or Bluebook values will not put a price to that investment, but those who know what to look for will value it.

Good aircraft in that sense do not last that long in the market and often do not even get to the open market before changing hands.

I also used the American escrow system in those cases. You can do something similar in Spain using a notary public or a lawyer with clear written conditions as to when money should change hands. I do not see why you would not be able to do the same thing in Germany, France or the UK. The major difference is that in the US, it is a system sanctioned by the FAA.

Part of the issue is also the scarcity of well looked after aircraft: if someone invests a lot in looking after their aircraft then the motivations to sell are typically not the usual market-driven ones and hence price is not low. Vref or Bluebook values will not put a price to that investment, but those who know what to look for will value it.

Spot on

I also suggest a search on

prebuy

as there are many past threads. That is the hard bit. In most cases there is significant travelling involved which is why one needs the seller to make an adequate disclosure first (a PDF of the logbooks, etc). And since most sellers don’t do that, buyers tend to buy the plane because they have travelled so far to see it… happens the same way with cars. Maybe that is why some sellers are economical with the information; they want to trap buyers into buying, after a long trip and money spent on a mechanic doing a prebuy.

I have always wondered why people buy brand new airplanes from the factory. If you value your time at anything above 0, I’m starting to see the attraction !