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For the Italian Yacht Group’s Patrick Hopkins a yacht auction in France proved a memorable and valuable experience.
“I’ve done a lot of interesting things in my career as yacht broker,” says IYG’s Patrick Hopkins with a chuckle, “but I never thought I’d be bidding $10 million on a yacht at an auction all done in French.”
Patrick found himself in this unusual situation via a usual route—he was showing a client around the Cannes Yachting Festival looking for a tri-deck in the 40-meter range. There he caught wind that there was a Dynamiq 135 named Stefania up for auction two and half hours away in the small town of La Ciotat, just outside Marseilles. After a few calls to ensure that everything was in place, Patrick convinced his client to go for a beautiful drive along the French coastline—not exactly the hardest sell he’s ever had to make.
Once they arrived in La Ciotat, it was nearly love at first sight. The yacht wasn’t a tri-deck but it had striking lines and a highly functional layout—just what the client was looking for. Fortuitously, the yacht’s previous owner had run into some legal trouble, so the sale would be at a bargain price during an auction run by the French government in October.
It all seemed like smooth enough sailing to Patrick, but soon complications arose. The auction, for somewhat opaque reasons, got pushed back, and then got pushed back again. Soon it was wintertime, and it seemed unlikely anyone wanted to buy a boat in France in the middle of January. Patrick sat back and waited, surmising that it would be a spring sale. In the meantime, he made use of the extra time, befriending the yacht’s state-appointed captain. Over countless phone calls and texts Patrick conducted thorough due diligence on the vessel, ensuring that it was the right boat for his client.
“My main goal with that was to err on the side of caution,” says Patrick. “This was a new process for me, so I wanted to triple check that I had all my bases covered. Maybe my client would get the boat in the auction, maybe he wouldn’t, but the one thing I knew for sure was that I was going to be completely prepared for whatever came up with the deal.”
Eventually the auction date was set for the week after the Palm Beach Boat Show. Patrick met his client at the show, and was asked to fly to France to get the yacht. He booked his ticket while sitting at the IYG display booth, and a few days later he found himself boarding a plane for Nice and wondering what exactly he’d gotten himself into.
When he arrived at the auction he met other bidders and French government officials, and that’s when it dawned on him that the entire auction would be done in French. “Luckily I took four years of French in high school and that helped, but yeah, safe to say it was an added degree of difficulty, that’s for sure,” says Patrick.
As the auction began he took his seat and did his best to suss out what was being said. Luckily his relationship with the French captain paid off, and he accompanied Patrick to the auction, helping to translate. Patrick had his client on the phone when the bidding began at $9.2 million. It quickly shot to $9.9 million. That’s when the client told him to bid $10 million. He did as told and the auction fell silent. A moment later the gavel slammed, and Patrick’s client was the proud new owner of Stefania.
“It all happened incredibly quickly in retrospect,” says Patrick. “But I have to give a lot of credit to the auction house, they were super communicative the whole time and I never felt like I was being left out of anything. Though the whole thing was definitely a trial-by-fire experience that was more than a little stressful for me, in the end it really only served to make me better at my job. How many brokers can say they got their client a boat at an auction done in another language? And beyond that, my client was thrilled with his new yacht, and to me and everyone else at IYG that’s always the ultimate goal.”
Gavel, gavel.
