Co-Ownership of Boats - anyone have experience???

W

Wood Zeppelin

New member
Hello All,

I want to buy (another) boat, but guess what, I don't want to pay for the whole thing!

Bear with me...

I use my boat(s) occasionally. They sit most of the year unused. But I still love them, and cherish the time I do get to use them.

Let's say you have two neighbors, and the three of you got together and bought one lawnmower. You simple agree to not use it all at the same time. And some other agreements around maintenance and repairs.

People co-own real estate. That's a much bigger deal!

Does anyone have experience going in and co-owning a boat!?! If so, please share! What was great about it? What was challenging?
 
Yeah, just finishing a couple years of co-owning a 25. Partner bought a bigger and smaller boat so I’m looking for another partner. It’s great, half the hassle and cost. From maintenance to upgrades it’s has been a good partnership. Little bit of friction over cleaning, lost knife(that wasn’t lost) and the exit but as long as people aren’t sensitive and remember that boating is very expensive it goes well.

It helps to have a partner who has the same basic vision. I’m always upgrading the boat and systems and my parter was on board. We did some good fishing together and I have young kids and he’s retired so often want to use the boat at different times.

With it for anything over 20 feet, due to the added cost and work, vs a smaller boat and cost.

Anyone looking in Victoria BC feel free to reach out to me.
 
I think it is more common than some may think. Several buddies I have share the ownership of airplanes. I had an uncle that shared the ownership of a Fleming 55 with his good friend and I never heard a complaint about it. Then again, money meant very little to him. I think it depends on who you're married to in the deal.
 
Oh yea. Oh no!

I had a formal, aka legal, co-owners agreement prepared when splitting the cost
of building a 42' Atlantic cat. During construction, things seemed to be fine.
We brain stormed all sorts of possible conditions/conflicts and thought we had a
handle on, well, most everything. We devoted a full year to this with a planned
'shakedown' winter cruise in the Exumas. Up to now, it was mostly good.

Once launched and underway together, the verbal agreements fell apart.
Long story short: one ship requires only one captain. So, we divided time aboard
to one-at-a-time. Seemed to help for a while. Then conflicts developed: who
caused the damage, where the boat was left in what condition, scheduling, asking
for payment for 'needed' items, equipment and maintenance, etc, etc.

The co-owner idea and legal agreement ended up in a shoreside crapper.
The boat was sold after about a year.

Lesson: a verbal or written agreement is only as good as the people involved.
Or, avoid saving some money on something you are passionate about.

Aye.
 
My brother has partnered with a few people on various large sailboats. It seems to work ok on larger/more expensive items. When you get down to the level of things one person could actually afford, but chooses to partner up with, then you get more disagreements (IMO), as in "I could afford this, why do I need to put up with his/her crap."

When you get to big ticket items and the choice is partner with someone or do without, there can be more incentive to play nice.

The other issue with big ticket items if one or more of the partners decide they don't want to participate anymore, then every one in the partnership may have to get out too (unless a replacement partner is found).

Personally, I'd rather have my own boat even if it means a smaller one than I could afford in a partnership just so no one messes with it but me. Less wear and tear on it if it sits more on the trailer too. If I had a boat that needed to sit in the water all the time, it might be a different story.
 
I co-owned a racing sailboat 45' long. We had every other week as skipper. Sometimes the one's whose week it was invited the other owner along and sometimes not.

It was all spelled out prior to the partnership. Be sure that you have the dissolution of partnership very carefully spelled out. I had to sell my half. The other co-owner didn't initially have the resources to buy my half. He didn't think I would sell outside of the partnership. I had to--and then he decided he wanted to own the entire boat.

It takes commitment.
 
In other words, as "all spelled out prior to the partnership",
it didn't work out.

It seems to me the partnership would "spell things out".
Written words can be referred to. Words cannot. And
what happened before, was simply verbal agreement,
which failed as all too often it does.

Commitment works best only after character, chemistry and compatibility of a
'partner' has been established, well established.

Aye.
 
Foggy":4j9e7a74 said:
In other words, as "all spelled out prior to the partnership",
it didn't work out.

It seems to me the partnership would "spell things out".
Written words can be referred to. Words cannot. And
what happened before, was simply verbal agreement,
which failed as all too often it does.

Commitment works best only after character, chemistry and compatibility of a
'partner' has been established, well established.

Aye.
Click to expand...

The partners must have sufficient imagination to consider all of the possibilities and permutations of things in order to have an agreement that covers everything. Usually, problems occur with things that were not thought of when the agreement was formulated and thus the agreement doesn't explicitly cover.

The partners also need to consider bad faith actions by the other partner and have these covered by the agreement. It can be difficult to discuss such things. Probably best to have an uninvolved 3rd party draft the agreement.
 
In a perfect world, things would work out. You could bank on it.

The truth is life can be messy, usually is at some point.

Aye.
 
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