Forty-six years, one trade.

Jeff Stanley is a lifetime yacht broker. He started in 1980, soon after graduating college, and has done nothing else since. That is unusual in a business most people arrive at from somewhere else and leave for somewhere else — and it is the single fact that explains the rest of this page.

In that time he has sold well over a thousand yachts, from 40 feet to 165. The range matters more than the number. A broker who works one segment learns one set of buyers, one set of yards, and one way of valuing a boat. Forty-six years across the whole spread means he has sat on both sides of most conversations already.

He also runs new builds, which is a different job from selling a boat and one very few brokers can credibly take on. Neptunus in Ontario and Johnson Yachts in Taiwan — specification through commissioning, managed end to end.

Two things he does are worth naming because they are the mechanism behind everything else. The first is the listing presentation: an overview built to actually inform a buyer, with the detail most brokers leave out. It is the thing clients mention most often, unprompted. The second is that he does not disappear at the closing — refits, upgrades, and the hundred small decisions that follow an owner into their first season. One client has him paying the yard bills and keeping the books on the boat years after the sale.

The majority of his business is repeat clients and referrals. He tends to let that speak for itself, so we will too: the letters his clients have written make the case better than a page about him can.