As we approach the halfway mark of the year, the used jet market continues to show improvement in terms of sales, but at the detriment (if you’re a seller) to price. Every day for the past several years, pricing has become more and more attractive to buyers. In retrospect, it seems that no seller left any money on the table when they rolled out of their previous aircraft and turned the keys over to a new owner. That said, buyers are not cloistered away and continue to buy actively, taking advantage of values no one could have ever predicted. Sub-$20 million Globals and GVs; GIVs and 604s that have traded below $4 million! You can go right down the list, large-cabin to small, and find eyebrow-raising, head-shaking selling prices. While the above examples often represent the lowest of the low in a given model segment, they offer buyers a compelling reason to step into the market at any level, as the percentage of price degradation hasn’t discriminated by serial number, or model year, so whether it’s an entry-level buyer, or top end, the discounted fleet benefits all.

Each manufacturer’s top used offerings continue to exert price compression on the lower models. For example, consider the Global Express, which recently hit an all-time high of 26 aircraft in inventory, or greater than 17 percent of the number in operation, a decidedly soft market. When aircraft start to stack up buyers often appear to get confused by the sheer number of offerings and tend to pull back until they can make sense of it. Case in point is the 3-to-1 ratio of Globals that sold in the last six months compared with the previous six-month period. In this case, as with so many other models, a price adjustment takes place, making the aircraft seem like such a great value, it makes no sense not to buy. Someone recently suggested that with the Gulfstream G650 eroding Bombardier’s lock on the wide-cabin domain, you might witness greater brand swapping going forward. Given the fact that this occurred just as G650s begin entering the fleet, it will be interesting to see if this unfolds in the months and years to come. The bottom line is that Global prices are adjusting, which is just the elixir needed to get that segment moving again.