Royal Balk Pitches a EUR 7m Van der Valk as a EUR 10m ReCraft

What is Royal Balk selling with Santa Maria T?

Royal Balk is selling a finished refit plan attached to a used yacht, not just a used yacht. The 36.8m steel Van der Valk is offered at EUR 7m in Valencia, with the yard's own ReCraft rebuild as the second half of the purchase.

The yard's own listing page for Santa Maria T carries the headline of a ReCraft opportunity, and it sits on the shipyard's website, not a brokerage one. Megayacht News reported the offer on 8 November under the name Santa Maria T ReCraft Edition. The central listing is held by Nauticon Yacht Services, so the yard is pairing a conventional sale with its own transformation programme.

Niels Lensen, who became Royal Balk's sales director on 1 July 2026, told Megayacht News that a ReCraft project doesn't have to start with an owner who already has a yacht. That sentence is the whole pitch. It addresses a buyer who has no boat and wants one built to his taste in a year, without waiting years for a new build slot. ReCraft is a Royal Balk trademark for a refit, redesign and technical upgrade meant to match new-build standards, and Lensen's brief covers 30 to 65 metre motor and sailing yachts.

What does Santa Maria T cost once the refit is finished?

The asking price is EUR 7m and Megayacht News gives the all-in cost from acquisition to completion as EUR 10m. By our arithmetic that leaves EUR 3m for the refit, about 43 percent on top of the purchase price.

The EUR 10m total comes from Megayacht News, which also reports that Royal Balk says redelivery can come within 12 months depending on final technical and aesthetic scope. The yard's own web page states the EUR 7m ask and the yacht's location in Valencia but gives no refit budget and no timeline. So the EUR 3m gap is our subtraction, not a published quote, and it could cover less than the whole work or more than the yard's headline implies once an owner chooses a pathway.

Spread over 36.8 metres, EUR 10m is roughly EUR 272,000 per metre for an eleven-year-old hull rebuilt to a new owner's brief. That's a yardstick and nothing more until the scope is written down. Anyone considering the offer should ask for the scope document, the exclusions list and the payment schedule before comparing it to anything.

What kind of yacht is Santa Maria T before any refit?

Santa Maria T is a 2015 steel-hulled, aluminium-superstructure trawler yacht from Van der Valk with a single owner since delivery and a stated range of about 3,600 nautical miles.

She was designed by Guido de Groot with naval architecture by Ginton, and she was a finalist in the World Superyacht Awards in 2016 for displacement motor yachts of 30 to 41.9 metres, per YachtBuyer. Twin Volvo Penta D16 engines of about 650 hp each give a top speed of 14.6 knots and a cruising speed of 11.2 knots. The yard says she carries 33,000 litres of fuel and burns about 90 litres an hour at cruising speed with both generators running.

Those figures hang together. At 10 knots, 3,600 nautical miles is 360 hours, and 360 hours at 90 litres an hour is 32,400 litres, nearly the whole tank, so the range claim leaves almost no reserve. That's our calculation, not the yard's, and it suggests treating 3,600 miles as a ceiling and not a working range. The accommodation is eight guests in four cabins with six crew. The yard describes a two-axis fin stabilisation system that works at anchor and underway, and the page says she was the first yacht delivered with that system. The main saloon opens to the aft deck through large four-way folding stainless-steel doors, and the aft deck seats eight for dining. The interior is in an Art Nouveau style, which is the first thing a refit would have to decide to keep or replace. She flies the Maltese flag and YachtBuyer records a refit in 2019, so the buyer should ask what that work covered.

Which refit options does Royal Balk offer for Santa Maria T?

The yard's page names two pathways, Royal Blue and Pearl White, both aimed at an expedition or offshore fisherman configuration, and it lists the same four advantages for each.

Those advantages are the shortest timeline to operation, a controlled investment level, proven platform reliability and a strongly utility-driven configuration. The page doesn't say what separates the two paths in cost or scope, and the heading refers to six pathways while listing two. The yard's renderings show the same hull in dark blue and in white, but the page doesn't state which image belongs to which pathway, so we haven't labelled them.

The sources also disagree on size. The yard's page gives 320 GT, while the YachtBuyer record for the same yacht gives 250 GT. Gross tonnage drives manning rules, port dues and survey requirements, and the yard's own figure may reflect a different measurement or a projected rebuilt volume, but nothing published says so. A buyer should ask for the tonnage certificate and see which number is on it, because every later regulatory cost follows from it.

Why would a refit yard list a yacht for sale?

A yard that controls the sale and the rebuild can capture both margins and fill its slots, and an owner gets one contract for the purchase and the transformation, but only if he's content to shop in one house.

Lensen comes to the job from the brokerage side. Marine Business World reports more than 30 years in yacht services, a boutique brokerage he founded in 2015 and an earlier post as sales director at Jongert. That background explains the shape of this offer, which reads like a broker's package with a shipyard behind it. He told the trade press he'll be at Cannes, Monaco, Metstrade, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach with the yard's team, so the pitch is aimed at the same buyers who walk those docks. Royal Balk's recent references are the 30.36 metre Ursus and the 50.4 metre Feadship Emerald. FYI Yachts reported the Ursus ReCraft as including a six-metre hull extension and diesel-electric propulsion. Santa Maria T is a far lighter project on paper, with the round-bilge hull kept and the work centred on the upper decks, the finishes and the stowage for tenders and water toys, according to Megayacht News.

For an owner the sensible test is independence. The seller, the refit yard and the price of the finished boat all sit at one address, so an independent survey and a second opinion on the refit quote aren't optional extras. If the EUR 10m total holds against a written scope, it's an attractive route to a 37 metre explorer-style yacht in about a year. If the scope grows, the single-contract convenience is exactly what makes it hard to walk away.