HulloShips is the owner-direct exchange for everything that floats — from a lake runabout to a 400-foot expedition ship. We exist for one stubborn reason: the people who built, ran and loved a vessel should be able to sell her themselves, talk to buyers themselves, and keep the 8–10% a broker would otherwise take. Behind the listings sits something rarer — the HulloShips Atlas, twenty maritime reference databases that make every boat on the water findable, valuable and understood.
HulloShips is a for-sale-by-owner marketplace for vessels. An owner — or a dealer, or a broker who wants their own storefront — creates a listing with photos, price, length, year, builder, hull, engine hours and a real story about the boat. We review it for quality and publish it to buyers worldwide. Inquiries land straight in the owner's inbox. No broker sits in the middle taking a cut, and no central agency locks up the listing.
Most boat-selling sites are run by brokerages and priced for brokerages. The commission is baked into the asking price whether a broker did much or not. We took the opposite stance: the platform earns nothing on the sale. Listing is free, an optional feature upgrade buys exposure, and the percentage that would have left the owner's pocket simply doesn't.
We list everything, not just yachts. Sailing yachts and cruiser-racers, motor yachts, trawlers and sportfishers, center consoles, superyachts and expedition ships — and the working fleet most marketplaces ignore: cargo ships, tankers, commercial fishing boats, tugs, ferries, supply boats, barges and research vessels. If it floats and changes hands, it belongs here.
Yacht brokerage commissions run 8% to 10% of the sale price — and on bigger boats the central-agency model can tie up a vessel for months. The math is plain, and the people best placed to tell a boat's story are the ones who owned her.
Ten percent of a $500,000 sportfisher is $50,000. On a $4M cruising catamaran it's $320,000–$400,000. That money is the broker's fee — or it's yours. We think it's yours.
Nobody describes a vessel more honestly or more fully than the owner who maintained her, ran her seasons and knows her quirks. Buyers value talking to that person, not a sales desk.
Length, beam, draft, year, builder, hull material, engine make and hours, fuel, flag, survey and condition — native vessel fields, not house fields bent to fit. Buyers filter on what actually matters at the dock.
Owner-direct shouldn't stop at pleasure craft. A fishing co-op selling a trawler, an operator retiring a ferry, a yard moving a tug — they deserve a direct market too. Here they have one.
A marketplace is only as good as what it knows. So we built the reference layer first: the largest open maritime atlas we're aware of, free to anyone, and wired directly into every listing. Where is the nearest deep-water marina? Who built this hull, and is the yard still open? What's a fair number for a 1998 Grand Banks 42 today? The Atlas answers — and the HulloValue estimator turns that knowledge into a price.
Marinas, harbours, lighthouses, shipyards, tide stations, yacht builders, brokers, charter fleets, famous ships and more — twenty linked datasets in all, plus the HulloValue estimator that prices any vessel from comparable sales and her own specs.
The heart of the exchange. Sell the boat you sailed or fished or lived aboard, set your own price, and keep the commission. From a $6,000 daysailer to a multi-million-dollar bluewater cruiser — same simple flow, same zero cut to us.
New- and brokerage-boat dealers get a clean, searchable storefront that reaches buyers far beyond their local market. List a single trade-in or a full inventory; your listings carry a dealer badge so buyers know who they're dealing with.
Independent yacht brokers are welcome too — as themselves, on their own terms. Run a profile, list your central agency boats, and reach the owner-direct audience without surrendering the listing to a closed network.
Commercial owners — fishing co-ops, ferry lines, towing companies, supply outfits, research institutions and yards — finally get a direct market for cargo ships, tankers, tugs, ferries, barges and workboats, the segment most yacht sites won't touch.
Cutting out the broker doesn't mean cutting out the guardrails. We moderate listings, protect contact details, and point both sides to qualified professionals when real money is on the line. The goal is simple: a market where a private buyer can deal with confidence and a private seller is never exposed.
Every listing is reviewed before it goes live — for photo quality, honest specs and a real, contactable owner. Suspicious or duplicate listings are pulled. We'd rather a smaller, cleaner fleet than a wall of noise.
Your phone number and email stay hidden. Inquiries route through the exchange to your inbox, and you decide when — and with whom — to share direct details. No scraping, no contact details on public display.
We say it on every page, and we mean it: commission a qualified marine surveyor before you close. The Atlas helps buyers find accredited surveyors near the boat, so a sea-trial and a hull inspection are never more than a search away.
Builder histories, comparable sales and the HulloValue estimate give both parties a shared, neutral reference for what a boat is worth — so negotiation starts from facts, not from a number someone made up.
HulloShips is the flagship maritime property of the WholeVoyage network — a family of sites built on a single conviction: that good reference data, openly available, makes ordinary people powerful. The same approach that powers the Atlas runs across the network. Here it's pointed at the water.
Because the marketplace and the reference layer are built together, they reinforce each other. List a boat and the Atlas tells you the nearest haul-out yard and a fair asking price. Browse a builder in the Atlas and you can see what their hulls are selling for, live, on the exchange. One keeps the other honest.
Have a question, a fleet to list, or a database you think the Atlas is missing? We'd like to hear it.
List free in minutes and keep the broker's 8–10% — or just come aboard and browse the owner-direct fleet. Either way, HulloShips never takes a cut.