Live it up on the high seas aboard Dh18m superyacht for sale in Abu Dhabi

A second-hand yacht moored in Abu Dhabi with four en suite cabins, a Jacuzzi and a room for four crew, has gone on the market, but watch out for the cost of the upkeep.

The Azimut 100 Leonardo boat in Yas Marina. Courtesy Bush and Noble

The musician David Lee Roth once said that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.

With a price tag of US$4.95 million (Dh18.2m) and four en suite cabins – including a master bedroom which would not look out of place in a large apartment – the Azimut 100 Leonardo certainly qualifies.

The boat, which is five years old, has just 324 hours on the clock and is in perfect condition, having had a full professional crew since it was new.

“The boat is a very large, what we class as a superyacht but it is designed to be an entertaining type yacht as well, so it has a lot of open space,” says John Bush, a director of Bush & Noble, the brokerage selling the vessel, which was founded almost three years ago in Dubai.

“It has a fly bridge, which means the very top level of the boat is made out like a terrace so you have a Jacuzzi on the terrace and a barbecue, lots of seating and a big table.”

You can comfortably fit 25 to 30 people on board when the boat is at anchor, making it a perfect corporate boat, according to Mr Bush. It has had a few charters but only in the day or evening, so nobody renting it has actually stayed on board overnight.

The yacht, which is anchored in Abu Dhabi, sleeps 10 people in four en suite cabins plus room for four crew. “The master cabin is massive. It is like a very large apartment master room,” says Mr Bush.

Spacious and luxurious it may be, but you can forget about any dreams to sail around the world on it. It is not a full ocean-going yacht and needs to be refuelled around every 300 miles. Still, that leaves plenty of weekend and island-hopping options regionally.

The owner is keen to sell the boat quickly, so has just dropped the price from $6.5m, making it a very good deal. And what the new owner saves in the initial outlay they can put towards the cost of the yacht’s upkeep, which will be considerable. They can expect to spend about $200,000 a year to cover expenses such as maintenance, mooring and crew, according to Mr Bush.

Q&A

John Bush, a company director at Bush & Noble, which claims to be the largest independent yacht brokerage in the Middle East, tells Gillian Duncan more about the market:

What kind of yachts do you buy and sell?

We mainly deal with superyachts – boats that are over 80 feet, which is what we class the luxury end of the market. In terms of metreage we specialise in boats between 24 and 40 metres. They typically range from $2m to $5m for a used superyacht; they are four to five cabin boats. It is like a house on the water, or a mansion on the water.

How is the market here?

The Gulf is a fair region for superyachts. It’s not as large as the south of France and the Caribbean and places like that, but it is pretty steady. A lot of the world’s largest mega-yachts are all owned by guys from this region. They also have within their fleet many smaller boats – still very large boats but smaller than their biggest – and they tend to stay down in this region. We have anything between 20 and 25 inquiries a day from people wanting to buy or sell.

How many boats do you sell a year?

I guess we normally move between 20 and 30 boats a year.

That figure sounds low. Is that because they cost so much?

That’s right. It is a different market from property. There are people who are very passionate about their boats and they tend to use some of their non-expendable income to buy a boat, but they tend to be sailing or fishing people.