Tankoa's 50m Vertige sells after a EUR 2m cut to EUR 26.5m

The boat and the number

Vertige is the 49.9-metre first hull of Tankoa's S501 range, delivered in 2017 in all-aluminium construction. She has been in the same ownership since new, and completed a comprehensive refit in 2023 that covered a full repaint and a refreshed interior. She was listed with Ocean Independence, and the last published asking price was EUR 26.5 million after a EUR 2 million reduction.

Asking is not achieved, and the closed figure has not been published. What is public is the shape of the deal: a nine-year-old yacht, one owner, one recent refit, one price cut, then a sale. That sequence is the useful part.

What it says about the 50-metre band

The 45 to 55 metre range is where the most liquid part of the large-yacht market sits, because it is where charter revenue, crew cost and berth availability still line up. Buyers in that band have had a wide choice of used tonnage this year, and the ones with the strongest hand have been paying for condition rather than for age on paper. Vertige had the condition.

The EUR 2 million move is the honest signal. On a mid-twenties asking price, a cut of that size is not a fire sale, it is the last step of a negotiation that both sides could see coming. Sellers who refuse that step tend to sit for another season and then take a larger one.

The refit-then-sell question

Owners repeatedly ask whether a major refit pays for itself at resale. The blunt answer is that it rarely returns its cost line for line, but it changes who will look at the boat at all. A 2017 hull with a 2023 repaint and interior gets shown to buyers who would not have opened the file on an unrefreshed sister.

The lesson for anyone holding a boat of similar age is to decide early. Refit work commissioned two years before a planned sale reaches the market as a current yacht. The same work started once the boat is already listed reads as repair, and buyers price it that way.