2012 MODEL YEAR ABOS BOAT BLUE BOOK HAS ARRIVED!

The used boat market is outrageous. There are and have been more than 12,000 different builders of boats from one off homemade to mass production.

No wonder the ABOS Marine Blue Book, or The Boat Blue Book as it is often referred to, is so popular. With 390,000 boats, motors, and trailers included in this latest edition, it helps cut through the complexity of the offerings with pricing and pertinent specifications.

Try and think of any other industry that comes close to this deeply fragmented business. How many current car brands are there in the U.S.? Less than 50. Heavy trucks? Less than 20. Beers? Maybe 1,000 or so.

We stay current with product offerings of cars, light medium and heavy trucks, motorcycles, ATV’s, motor homes and travel trailers, agricultural tractors, grounds equipment, and LSV’s, but nothing comes close to the sheer volume of adding more than 7,000 new models of boats, motors, and trailers from more than 1,000 different manufacturers. Our staff stays busy year round gathering new model information and tracking used values for all the boats in our comprehensive production system.

When a builder goes out of business, someone new buys the molds, and voila! – a new boat company is born. The cost of entry is relatively low as a good portion of the cost of a boat is labor. You can build a fiberglass boat in a garage or a barn or a multimillion dollar factory. You can have sophisticated molding techniques costing hundreds of millions of dollars to create and refine or you can use a $500 chopper gun. You can hire dozens of design engineers and production engineers, or a few highly skilled craftsmen with a good work ethic can produce a nice boat.

As a valuation guide company, we are celebrating our 100th anniversary. The ABOS Marine Blue Book has been around 62 of those 100 years and is bigger, better, and more valuable than ever. Test drive our latest web site at www.abos.com.