For Sales: 
Worth Avenue Yachts is a premier yacht brokerage firm that goes beyond selling and listing boats.
“One of the other things that we do as yacht brokers is that we act as consultants,” explains William Baldwin, broker.
In addition to managing luxury yacht listings, the company also facilitates charters and new yacht construction.
“We also advise comps and other market analyses to price yachts correctly and make informed consultations. This helps us coordinate surveys, sales agreements, and closing documents.”
With yacht prices starting in the low seven figures, these luxury seacrafts require an incredibly targeted strategy that demands heavy networking among high-wealth individuals. Baldwin quickly discovered that he needed a faster, more efficient method for identifying prospects across the country.
Below, we discuss how Family Office List stepped in to help Baldwin identify and build the connections he needed.
Positive Outcomes
- Worth Avenue Yachts secured a number of listings using Family Office Data
- Family Office List helped Worth Avenue Yachts streamline its outreach by providing quick and immediate access to a broader network of high-value individuals
- When contacting family offices, Worth Avenue Yachts was able to craft a personal and more effective outreach with data from Family Office Lists
- Family Office List enabled Worth Avenue Yachts to better leverage their internal marketing data to identify active Yacht Club members within the Family Office community to better contextualize new relationships
“The contacts I made through Family Office List by far paid off more than contacts I made through cold calls.” William Baldwin
The Challenge: Identifying Prospective Customers
The yacht brokerage business, just like any other ultra-high-end real estate brokerage, is all about your contacts.
When a family office wants to purchase or charter a yacht, it’s not by browsing the internet—it’s by leaning on its connections and talking to trusted peers to find the right vendor.
Knowing that personal connections were key to these yacht transactions, Baldwin felt his cold calling and generic research weren’t enough.
He had difficulty gauging potential customers’ interest before reaching out, wasting time and energy. And when he did reach out, he couldn’t access the right information to make a key personal connection.
Furthermore, because family offices tend to keep low profiles, Baldwin found himself reaching out on less formal channels, like social media, which he says isn’t necessarily where his target audience typically conducts business.
The Solution: Immediate Access to Family Office Lists
Clients like Baldwin and others in the luxury service market have found Family Office List’s contact lists incredibly valuable.
Baldwin was able to start his research with a quick search in the database for the term “yacht,” bringing up family offices with an interest in boating.
“There are a lot of fund managers and members of family offices that are very interested and yachting,” said Baldwin.
The platform’s search capability eliminated the need for the “spray and pray” approach that static and less detailed lists encourage. No one enjoys putting others on the defense from irrelevant cold calling, so the invaluable data of these family offices’ interests made outreach better received.
With family offices readily providing referrals to each other, Family Office List’s contact lists allowed Baldwin to make personal connections quickly and significantly expand his universe of potential clients and customers.
More specifically, Family Office List’s data can be filtered by assets under management, allowing Baldwin to target only those with sufficient levels of wealth to support a yacht purchase or charter.
Generally, $100 million is the baseline AUM threshold for single-family offices, while multifamily offices may manage several families’ assets to allow them to reach that $100 million threshold. By focusing on those family offices at the top of the AUM list, Baldwin can ensure that his marketing efforts are landing at their intended targets, freeing up his time to focus on relationship-building instead of scattershot messaging.
The Result: A Fast-Growing Network of Clients
“You’d think that I’d only find potential clients in New York or Newport, but I made a great connection in Chicago and the Midwest through Family Office List,” said Baldwin.
Once Baldwin combined the family office data provided by Family Office List with his own marketing data, he discovered something interesting—at least a dozen of his new family office connections were also yacht club members. This revelation allowed him to deepen and better contextualize these relationships, as well as target a new industry segment.
Another interesting—and unexpected—discovery was the multiple levels of connection that could be built among each family office.
Baldwin found that Worth Avenue’s yachts appeal to members of a family office themselves, but they can also be attractive to family offices’ fund managers and money managers, some of whom can afford yachts in their own right. In other words, even if a particular family office isn’t currently in the market for a yacht, it may know or be affiliated with someone who is.
All in all, Family Office List’s client services have helped Baldwin increase the speed and efficiency with which he builds relationships with his target customer base.
If you’d like to learn more about Family Office List and the benefits you can realize from working with family offices for yacht sales and brokerage, contact us today. Our well-researched and up-to-date client list will provide you with a major advantage over the competition.