Search for yacht support vessels for sale and you will find a thin scatter of brokerage listings, because this market does not work like the yacht market. Purpose-built support vessels are rare (well under a hundred exist worldwide), most owners buy them to keep them, and the good ones change hands before a listing is written. Buying one is a sourcing exercise, not a browsing exercise.
This page covers what is actually for sale in the segment, what it costs, and how to run the purchase.
The two markets
Purpose-built support vessels. Tonnage designed from the keel up to run behind a superyacht: big open aft deck, knuckle-boom crane, tender and toy stowage, helicopter deck on the larger units, crew accommodation, and hull lines that keep station with a fast mothership. Damen Yachting's YS series defined the modern category; Lynx's YXT line covers the compact end. Pre-owned examples surface a few times a year and sell fast, because the alternative is a new-build slot measured in years. The shadow vessel builders page profiles the yards.
Conversions. Offshore platform supply vessels, standby vessels and fishing tonnage converted to yacht support duty. Purchase prices for donor hulls are low relative to the yacht market, but conversion cost and time are routinely underestimated; a proper conversion is an 18 to 30 month project and the result still carries commercial-hull manners. The economics work when the programme genuinely needs deadweight and deck area rather than polish.
What drives price
Size and age matter less than in the yacht market. The real price drivers are crane capacity and certification (a certified 20-tonne knuckle boom is the heart of the boat), helicopter capability (a certified touch-and-go deck versus a full hangar operation changes the class notation and the price band), fuel and range for transatlantic positioning, and crew berths, because a support vessel that cannot house its own crew plus rotational specialists (dive, helicopter, security) pushes the problem back onto the mothership.
How a purchase actually runs
The process mirrors how we run chase boat and tender briefs, scaled up:
- Define the mission. What the vessel must carry (tenders, toys, helicopter, submersible, vehicles), where it must follow, and at what speed. The support vessel sizes page maps missions to length bands.
- Map live availability. Brokerage listings, quiet sales, conversion donors and new-build slots, in parallel. This is where the market's opacity costs unrepresented buyers the most.
- Survey against the mission. Crane certification, deck load ratings, class status and helicopter certification are the items that kill deals late.
- Negotiate, close, refit. Even a purpose-built pre-owned unit usually takes a yard period to configure for the new programme's toy and tender list.
We do not run public support vessel listings; the pre-owned register covers tenders and chase boats. For support tonnage, start an enquiry with the mothership, the toy list and the operating pattern, and we will map the live market against it.