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Yacht brokers' Web site making headway(Palm Beach Post, The (FL) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 15--Five years after its launch, a broker-driven yacht listing service is finally focusing on the business of selling boats. Despite a rocky start that landed the company on the losing end of a copyright lawsuit, YachtCouncil is positioning itself as the preferred system for many of the top yacht brokers. "We're recognized by the industry as a premier player," said Steven Myers, president of Marine Solutions, the company that produces and manages the multiple-listing service for the International Yacht Council. "Our goal is to promote the professional yacht broker." Marine Solutions -- which just moved its offices from Dania Beach to West Palm Beach, snagging a waterfront view at Palm Harbor Marina downtown -- had a staff of three at its headquarters, with 10 programmers in Moscow. The company produces two sites: YachtCouncil.com, a site for consumers to search for boats, and YachtCouncil.org, a members-only site for brokers to manage their listings. The site gives brokers a variety of tools to produce market reports, track sales and search for vessels. It has grown to more than 10,000 central listings -- most for vessels longer than 50 feet -- that are updated instantly when brokers make changes. "It's more than a Web site. It's basically a software package that powers a yacht brokerage business," Myers said. "The professional salesman role is changing. You have to become a multimedia expert." Like much of the world, the Internet is rapidly changing the yacht sales business, opening the doors for anyone to post boat listings and compete with professional brokers. YachtCouncil, in part, grew out of brokers' desire to defend their turf. "We're in the information business. We're only as good as the information that's out there, and it has to be accurate and timely. This is the only site where we can find this," said Hank Halstead, president of Northrop & Johnson Yacht Brokers in Newport, R.I., and a founding board member of the International Yacht Council. Last year, about 3,200 vessels totaling $2.5 billion were sold through YachtCouncil. The site is drawing an average of 17,000 visitors a day, Myers said. "It's a tool that helps make our life that much easier," said Bruce Morgan, broker for Palm Beach Yachts International in West Palm Beach. "This is our way of getting information to our clients." In recent months, YachtCouncil has made an aggressive push to promote its product to boaters. Last fall, Myers went to 16 boat shows in three months to tout the Web site. But the company's early years were spent fighting a legal battle and improving its technology. The International Yacht Council is a coalition of seven trade groups including the Florida Yacht Brokers Associations that got together in June 2000 to develop a multiple-listing service that would be run by their industry, rather than private business. With listings scattered all over the Internet, the brokers wanted to create a central source, similar to the multiple-listing service used in the real estate industry. To subscribe, brokers have to belong to one of the member trade associations. It was also an effort to gain control of their listing information from a private company that had the monopoly on yacht listings. Fort Lauderdale-based BUC International Corp. had been the industry leader for 20 years with the first electronic listing system for yacht sales. And the publisher's used-boat price guides has been the industry standard for decades. But BUC maintained that once brokers entered their vessel information into its system, the company owned the listings. The brokers argued that they owned their listings, so the international group chose Myers' company to produce a new listing service. The sites launched in 2001, and the council encouraged its members to simply cut and paste their listings into the new system -- a move that ultimately led to its court loss. BUC fought back, suing the trade associations and Marine Solutions in June 2002 for copyright infringement, claiming that YachtCouncil copied proprietary data from BUC's online listing service. A federal jury ruled in BUC's favor in April 2004, awarding the company $1.6 million, and the judge ordered YachtCouncil to stop copying descriptions from listings in the BUC system. The brokers' lawyer even conceded that more than 4,000 listings had been copied from the BUC Web site. Appeals from both sides are still pending in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, other online listing services have appeared. And YachtCouncil has tweaked the way its members post their listings to make sure the information has not been copied from another service. YachtCouncil has grown to 1,400 individual members from about 400 brokerage houses, Myers said, including most of the industry leaders. "We all use it. This is our industry, and these are our boats that are listed. That's why it was founded," said George Jousma, president of Fort Lauderdale-based Allied Richard Bertram Marine Group and past president of the Florida brokers association. BUC President Walter Sullivan said his company remains profitable, though he admits that YachtCouncil has hurt his business. But he said the pending appeal could change things. It's unclear when the case could be decided. "To this point, it looks like they're successful, but they may not remain successful," he said. "The cloud is hanging over both heads. "At some point, a decision will be made. If it puts us in a position to collect on our judgment, we will." |