Where to park your superyacht
As sizes relentlessly grow — some to Airbus scale — owners face a shortage of spots in the world’s pleasure zones large enough to berth them
“I recommend you try and track down Splinter Fangman,” says Martin Redmayne, chair of the Superyacht Group, which researches and publishes on the industry. “He’s made for TV.”
If you need to park your superyacht in the south of France, he’s one of a handful who are the brokers for berths large enough for billionaires.
Despite his Wild West name, Fangman is clean cut and gently tanned. He’s a broker for international yacht dealer Edmiston, the agent for new leaseholds for superyacht berths in Port Vauban in Antibes, between Cannes and Nice.
The port has one area known as the Quai des Milliardaires — the Billionaires’ Quay, officially called Quai Camille Rayon — recently redeveloped by the International Yacht Club d’Antibes. All the leases came up for renewal in the past two years.
That included A18, one of the “iconic” slips in the Mediterranean, according to Fangman. It can take a yacht of 160 metres and it was announced it had been sold last month.
Fangman won’t reveal the asking price. Smaller berths on the same stretch are A13, suitable for a 110m yacht, which is currently on the market for €13mn for a 10-year lease. A5, a mere 85m, is available for €8.4mn on the same terms.
There are only so many people with yachts that size.
One of them is Jeff Bezos, whose schooner the Koru, with three masts and sails, hit the water last year. At 127m, more than one and a half Airbus A380s, it is a prime example of the difficulties superyacht owners are facing. When he tried to moor in Fort Lauderdale in Florida, no berth was big enough, so the Koru had to take shelter in an industrial area of Port Everglades, with multicoloured shipping containers and steel gantries as its neighbours.
Yachting season is on its way, and the Koru has made its way across the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and, after passing by Gibraltar, at the time of writing it has stopped in a shipyard near Marseille. His is not the only big boat now on the move.
“Typically, now, you see a lot of marinas are still a little bit empty because a lot of the boats are in the shipyards,” says Fangman. “In about two weeks’ time, you’ll see all the marinas in the south of France and different cruising areas start filling up, with the boats kind of positioning themselves, waiting for charters, waiting for owner trips.”
The race for the largest yacht is well documented but the place to put that yacht is beginning to get more complicated. While ports such as Cannes and Ibiza rent spots for festivals and events, there is the question of where you station your boat longer term.
Most boats of all sizes only spend 10 per cent of their time cruising, says Martin Redmayne. The rest of the time is spent docked. “So therefore people have this thought process: we need a place called home.” That’s not just for the owners but also for long-term crew members — a place to buy houses and send their children to school.
The increase in numbers of the mid-sized superyachts, which are usually 40m-80m, means there’s increased competition to get a permanent spot. The “home berth” ports include Barcelona’s Port Vell, which has a good shipyard nearby, but is half a day’s sail from the cruising grounds of the Balearics. Porto Montenegro in the Bay of Kotor is also considered a prime leisure port. For the south of France, Vauban is one of the few that can accommodate the biggest boats.
“No more than 15 per cent of the berths will be on long lease,” says Redmayne. “But taken as a percentage of the bigger berths, above 50m, it may be 40 per cent.”
Leaseholders can rent out their spots to other boats to recoup some of their costs. At Port Vauban, around 80 per cent of subletting income is returned to the owner, according to Fangman.
A nine-year leasehold for a 100m yacht in Porto Montenegro is currently available for €7.72mn. But as with property, location is everything and Port Vauban remains the most sought after on the coast.
A18 is currently empty, according to open data maps that track ship positioning, at the time of going to press. Sitting alongside it in the Quai in other prime slots are the 78m-Montkaj, the 65m-Zazou and the Sibelle, a 67m yacht with five “staterooms” — more normally called bedrooms — and a wellness area. It is on sale for €27.5mn.
The Dilbar, the largest yacht in the world by volume, used to occupy the A18 slot, says Fangman. Gulbakhor Ismailova, the sister of Uzbek-Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, was placed under sanctions on the grounds that she was the legal owner of some of Usamov’s assets, including the Dilbar. It has left the port.
The problem facing marinas is how to accommodate the larger boats. It is due to the growing number of yachts above 40m, which are trying to dock in marinas that were built for much smaller boats.
“Owners are starting to understand that the berth supply is quite stagnant,” says Fangman. “It is extremely complicated to start a new marina, especially in the south of France [due to zoning issues and a lack of sheltered harbours]. With more and more boats on the water . . . the supply imbalances are getting out of proportion.”
Redmayne concurs. “Because we’re building so many boats here and we’re not able to reconfigure marinas quick enough. And to build a brand new marina takes 10 to 15 years of planning and local authority approvals so we’re heading for a bit of a logjam.”
Pressure is also building for mid-sized superyachts, “40m to 60m, of which there are about 1,000, and 60m-80m yachts, of which there are 500,” says Redmayne.
“These are relatively small numbers in the grand scheme of the number of ultra-wealthy, but you can see how the market has grown since 2000,” he says, referring to data from his research team.
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It isn’t just a safe harbour. Boat owners are also looking for facilities. While major repairs happen in shipyards, a marina needs to be able to provide some technical services.
But it also needs to provide a good place to hang out. Antibes’ port was getting “a little bit tired and old”, says Redmayne. “If you look at the south of France now, a lot of the marinas are close to the end of their concession, so this is the start of a whole wave of upgrades.” Concessions are granted to private companies to run the marinas for up to 50 years. They, in turn, sell on the leases.
The International Yacht Club d’Antibes, under its new 20-year concession, has given its section of a marina a €135mn upgrade, including a new reception area for helipad users, social and fitness areas for crew and a new club house built by the award-winning architect Philippe Prost. His other commissions include the Ring of Memory, a centennial first world war memorial in Ablain-Saint-Nazaire that takes the form of a 75m-wide ribbon of concrete.
Also added to the IYCA area of Port Vauban is privacy. It now has high-grade maritime security installed. “There are gates, you have to be registered to get in, which is quite attractive to large yacht owners,” says Fangman, who cites the issues around Kaos, a 110m superyacht moored in Ibiza that was vandalised with paint by eco-activists last summer.
For smaller boat owners, long-term leaseholds are less likely due to price. But for larger ones, buying a leasehold over renting seems relatively small beer.
“It’s a luxury, but it makes sense,” says Fangman, “if you have a boat for a few hundred million, to spend a bit extra and maybe even have multiple [berths]. There may be five favourite places where someone goes. It makes sense to buy in those main places where you have trouble getting a spot.”