What You Need to Know About the Preowned Business Jet Market

This is just one of the special reports included in Your Guide to Flying Privately, which covers all the basics you need to know to make smart decisions about charter, fractional shares, jet cards, and aircraft ownership. View the entire guide.

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Whether you’re a prospective buyer or seller, you may well be feeling confused about the preowned aircraft market’s course this year. First, an expanding array of transaction and residual-value reports and forecasts is producing a flood of information, oftentimes conflicting. Add in more finely parsed analyses from traditional market data providers—and the differences in the fleets they track and their reporting methodologies—and the potential for a muddled market view becomes wide enough to fly a fleet of preowned BBJs through.

But as the 10th anniversary of the 2008 aircraft market meltdown nears, we can say that the preowned arena continued this year its search for stability and positive indicators; and it did so against a now-perennial backdrop of declining values and glass-quarter-full optimism levels. Aircraft value tracker Vref captured the spirit of the 2017 market in its third-quarter newsletter: "Although this segment continues to trend down," it said of values for preowned business jets, “the decline is much less than in the recent past. We are viewing this as a positive change."