Reviews from Stingray customers

This is my first boat using a broker. I've bought a number of boats directly from sellers. I have mixed feelings about using a brokerage. The broker was very nice and knew his stuff. He took the time to meet with us for an entire afternoon drove to two different marinas that were 60 miles apart. I have only positive things to say about the people at Popyachts. However the entire experience of using a brokerage was not ideal. We looked at several boats, with the one we liked being 2 hours away. However the company rules say that we could not go for a sea trial without first agreeing on a selling price. Since we were looking at several boats, how can you proactively agree on a price (site unseen). Every time I have bought a boat from a private seller, I get to do a sea trial on the first day and then decide if I want to make an offer. Once we decided that we liked the boat, we had to negotiate the price, and then decide if we would drive 2 hours again for a sea trial. Since we didn't have time to drive 4 hours round trip multiple times, we had to arrange for the sea trial, survey and closing all on the same day. Scheduling all of this on the same day was not easy as the brokerage does not do any scheduling with any party other than the seller. In the end, we did make it all work and we took the boat home the same day. The other bad part was that it took 5 weeks for the title and lien release to arrive. I had a document that showed that I owned the boat, but I didn't have any documents to make my boat legal to use for 5 weeks. That's a long time in Michigan when the season is winding down. I believe the issue was mostly on the seller's Bank's side, but I've never had it take that long to release a lien when dealing with private sellers on other boats or cars. With a private seller, you can go to the bank with the seller and ask them to sign the lien release right away.