Lurssen sells a 122.5m for 2030, and 22 guests change the rulebook

What has been sold, and what has not been said

Lurssen has sold Project Elusive, a 122.5 metre motor yacht scheduled for delivery in 2030. BOAT International reported the sale on 3 August 2026 and YachtBuyer carried it the same day, both giving the same length and the same delivery year. Construction is already under way at Lurssen's Bremen facility, and Moran Yacht & Ship, which brokered the sale, will supervise the build through to handover. BOAT International puts the yacht at 5,500 gross tonnes, 16.8 metres in the beam and 4.4 metres in draught, with accommodation for 22 guests in 11 cabins. Those volume figures currently rest on that single report, so they are best read as reported rather than confirmed.

What has not been released matters as much as what has. There is no price, no named exterior or interior designer, no renders, no flag, no propulsion specification and no owner. Lurssen's own press room has published nothing about the sale, and Moran lists Project Elusive among its builds in progress without detail. Moran also brokered an earlier 123 metre Lurssen, Project Omega, and both appear on its books as separate hulls with different delivery years, which is worth knowing before the two are confused. A yacht of this size sold in 2026 for 2030 will normally stay dark until it is close to launch, and the absence of a public price means there is no comparable to price the next slot against.

Twenty-two guests is not a detail, it is a different code

Most large yachts stop at 12 guests, and the reason is regulatory rather than architectural. The Red Ensign Group Yacht Code splits at exactly that number: Part A covers yachts carrying up to 12 passengers, Part B covers those carrying more than 12 and not more than 36. Part B, which replaced the old Passenger Yacht Code in 2017, sets its own design criteria, construction standards and safety measures, and caps total persons on board at 200. If Project Elusive is certified for the 22 guests BOAT International reports, and if she is registered under a Red Ensign flag, she sits in Part B rather than Part A.

That is not a formality. Part B pushes a yacht toward passenger-ship thinking on subdivision, escape routes, fire zones and damage stability, and that work has to be designed in from the first steel rather than added at outfitting. It is a large part of why so many 100 metre yachts are built with 12 guest berths and a great deal of volume per guest instead of more cabins. An owner ordering into this tier should read it as a trade: 22 berths buy real capacity for family and guests, and they cost compliance engineering, crew and space that a 12-guest boat of the same length never spends. The flag has not been published, so the code path remains an implication of the guest number rather than a confirmed fact.

Four years of yard time, behind eight hulls

The gap between this sale and the 2030 delivery is the most portable number in the story. Lurssen says a project typically takes about four years of development and construction, and a mid-2026 sale for 2030 delivery matches that almost exactly. YachtBuyer reported the sale as taking the yard's order book to eight yachts. For a buyer thinking about this tier, that is the practical lead time: a contract signed now is a boat in the late 2020s at the earliest, and the slot is the scarce good rather than the design.

Lurssen's recent record explains why the queue exists at all. Marine Industry News reported on 31 July 2026 that the yard delivered six yachts in a single year, ranging from 75 to 140 metres, among them the 117 metre Boardwalk, the 114 metre Nausicaa and the 102.4 metre Nixie. The yard says more than 30 of its yachts over 100 metres are in operation, and that over a third of the world's 100 largest yachts are Lurssen built. Peter Lurssen, the chief executive, called six deliveries in a year "a remarkable achievement, and the commitment of everyone involved deserves enormous credit". Michael Breman, the senior sales director, described the yard's method by saying every conversation with a client "always starts with a blank canvas".

The top of the market is not the market

This sale lands in a week when much of the rest of the fleet is discounting. BOAT International's brokerage pages currently carry a EUR 1.8 million cut on the 34 metre Solaris CeFeA, a EUR 750,000 cut on the 33 metre Custom Line Queen J III, a USD 2.6 million cut on the 42 metre HJB Fabulous Character and a EUR 2 million reduction on the 48 metre Admiral Althea. Marine Industry News reported on 3 August 2026 that Ferretti Group's first half net revenue fell 5.6 per cent, though the group also reported strong cash generation. Those boats and those numbers are the middle and upper-middle of the market, and they are moving on price.

The 100 metre-plus segment does not work that way. It is an order book rather than an inventory: the boats are commissioned rather than chosen from stock, and the buyer count is small enough that a single contract moves the annual total. For an owner the useful read is that softness in the 30 to 50 metre brokerage market is not a signal about the top, and strength at the top is not a signal about the middle. They are two different markets that happen to share a trade press. Anyone using one as a proxy for the other will misprice a boat, in either direction.

What a yacht like this costs to keep

No running cost figure for Project Elusive exists, and none is likely to be published. What is available is the planning arithmetic that management companies actually use. The old shorthand of 10 per cent of purchase price a year is now widely treated as too low: Fraser and several 2026 cost guides put a yacht above 50 metres at 12 to 15 per cent of current market value annually, and yachts above 80 metres at 15 to 20 per cent. Crew is consistently the largest single line, at roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the total, and it scales with the guest count as much as with the length.

Applied to this tier the arithmetic is blunt. Industry cost guides put a fully custom 100 metre-plus build from about EUR 180 million, frequently well beyond EUR 450 million, with roughly GBP 1 million per metre used as a rough check above 90 metres. Against a value anywhere in that range, a 15 to 20 per cent annual operating figure is a very large standing commitment, before any refit or major survey. None of that is specific to Project Elusive, and this desk has published no figure that is. The price is undisclosed, so any running cost quoted for this particular yacht would be a guess dressed up as a fact.