Should you use the broker's surveyor or appoint your own?

The shape of a brokered sale

A brokered sale has a defined structure. The owner appoints a broker under a central agency agreement. That agreement gives the broker exclusive conduct of the sale. Enquiries are directed through them.

Commission is traditionally paid by the seller. It is set in writing in that agreement and it falls due when the yacht is sold. Where a second broker introduces the buyer, the two divide it between them. Around ten per cent is the figure usually quoted in the brokerage market.

None of this is improper and none of it is hidden. It is the ordinary machinery of the market. The point for a buyer is narrower than misconduct. Every professional already engaged in that transaction was engaged by the seller. Their duties run to the seller. The buyer has nobody until the buyer appoints somebody.

The buyer is already paying

The survey is the buyer's cost. So is lifting the vessel for inspection. That is settled practice and nobody disputes it.

Which makes the position worth stating plainly. The buyer is funding the only genuinely independent piece of evidence in the transaction. The question was never who pays. It is who chooses, who instructs, who receives the report and who is entitled to rely on it.

The recommendation is usually made in good faith

A broker selling yachts every month knows which surveyors arrive when they said they would, write clearly and do not raise alarms that dissolve on closer inspection. That knowledge is real and it has value.

It is also the difficulty. A surveyor who is recommended regularly holds a commercial relationship with the source of those recommendations. Nobody needs to act improperly for that to shape an outcome. An incentive does not have to be conscious to operate. Being firm about a marginal finding costs nothing today. It may cost the next referral.

Competence and independence are separate qualities. A broker's candidate may hold the first in abundance. Only the buyer can secure the second.

The regulatory gap nobody puts to buyers

In the United Kingdom there is no licence to practise as a marine surveyor on a privately used pleasure vessel. There is no statutory register. There is no qualification required by law. The International Institute of Marine Surveying, the profession's own body, describes the industry as one that "remains largely unregulated".

Buyers frequently hear that a surveyor is authorised by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, then reasonably assume a licensing regime stands behind the work. That is not what the phrase means. Certifying authorities are authorised by the MCA to examine and certificate vessels in commercial use up to twenty four metres load line length, under the small commercial vessel codes. They certify vessels rather than surveyors. A yacht that meets the definition of a pleasure vessel sits outside the scope of those codes entirely.

On the vessels where this matters most the gap is wider still. A large yacht in private use is not reached by that regime at any point.

The conclusion is not that surveyors are unqualified. A great many hold serious credentials and carry them properly. The conclusion is that the credentials are voluntary. Nothing verifies them on the buyer's behalf. The professional body says as much: it places the burden on the owner to be satisfied that the surveyor is competent for the particular job. It tells the owner to ask the surveyor to confirm that professional indemnity cover is current and adequate.

What to establish before instructing anyone

None of this requires technical knowledge. It requires asking, in writing, before an engagement exists.

• Membership and its grade, confirmed with the professional body directly rather than taken from a website badge or a curriculum vitae.
• Professional indemnity cover, current and at a level that bears some relation to the value of the vessel being bought.
• Experience at this size and type, in the disciplines the vessel actually needs rather than in surveying generally.
• Who instructs, who the report is addressed to and who may rely on it. These are three different questions. On a large vessel they are frequently answered carelessly.
• Any connection to the seller, the broker, the manager or the yard, in the recent past as well as today.

Scope belongs in the same conversation. What the surveyor will be permitted to open and enter is settled before anyone boards rather than discovered on the day. We have set out what access a surveyor should have and what a refusal tells you separately. The documents worth demanding in advance are covered in what a maintenance record tells you that the vessel cannot.

The one answer that ends the conversation

Of everything a buyer might screen for, a single item disqualifies outright. Conflict of interest. It is also the only one a buyer can test without knowing anything about machinery.

Ask directly. Has this surveyor worked for the seller, the broker, the manager or the yard? Ask when. Ask how often. An independent professional answers that question without discomfort. Hesitation is itself information.

What independence actually buys

The value of instructing your own surveyor is not that they find more defects. A good surveyor from any source finds what is there.

The value is that the finding does not have to survive a relationship. It is written in the same words whether it is convenient or not. It is addressed to you. It is yours to use, to disclose or to withhold. If it becomes the basis of a conversation about price, nobody on the other side of that conversation is also the person who chose the expert. What follows from a report of that kind is a separate subject. We have covered it in what happens once defects are found.

A fair reading of the other side

Brokers are not the adversary in this. A broker who wants a clean completion has a real interest in problems surfacing before contract rather than afterwards. A dispute after delivery serves nobody. Many brokers will offer several names without hesitation. That is the behaviour of somebody expecting scrutiny rather than avoiding it.

The advice that follows is therefore not to refuse the names. Take them. Then verify independently and instruct directly. The person examining the vessel should be engaged by the person buying it. Asking the seller's agent for candidates is reasonable. Allowing the seller's agent to appoint the buyer's expert is a different thing altogether.

The disciplines a vessel needs are a question in their own right. So is the reason one specialist rarely covers all of them. How we approach an inspection sets out the shape of it.