A multi-engine, instrument rated pilot, James Wynbrandt has been an AIN and Business Jet Traveler contributor since 2003. His in-depth reporting and insightful features have won more than a dozen editorial honors, including two National Business Aviation Association Gold Wing Awards (2019; 2021), and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Barron’s, Fortune, Forbes, and Smithsonian Air &amp; Space. He has flown his Mooney M20K 252 on assignments throughout North and Central America and the Caribbean. Wynbrandt is also the author of Flying High (Wiley &amp; Sons), a biography of Jet Blue founder David Neeleman, as well as histories, references works, and books on a variety of other topics from major publishers. He lives in New York City.

Contributor - Business Aviation

James Wynbrandt

Aircraft market data services powerhouse JetNet (Booth&nbsp;1246) is highlighting the benefits of its customizable database access options and presenting its traditional State of the Market briefing covering new and preowned aircraft transaction activity at noon on Tuesday, October 18, at NBAA-BACE 2022.

 


On the eve of the show, company&nbsp;senior v-p sales&nbsp;Paul Cardarelli&nbsp;recalled the preowned market’s unusual Covid-era activity beginning in 2020, when transactions teetered between pandemic-shutdown levels and a resurgence of demand. An average of 2,220 aircraft were for sale in any given month that year, representing 10 percent of the in-service fleet—a percentage long considered the benchmark of a “balanced” market, Cardarelli noted. The composite for-sale aircraft in 2020 was a 20-year-old business jet priced at $3.88 million.

 


Since then, inventory has been dropping sharply, the market having been picked over as demand has remained strong, boosting prices even as the desirability of the aircraft offered has declined. This year, as of the beginning of September, an average of just 775 jets were on the market, a 44 percent drop from 2021, which itself was off 40 percent from 2020 inventory levels. The composite model so far this year is a 24-year-old jet priced at $4.2 million.

 


“So the quick takeaway,” said Cardarelli, is that&nbsp;if “you buy an airplane today, it's going to be four years older than it was [if you'd bought] in 2020&nbsp;and it's going to be 8.2 percent more expensive.”

 


Though 2020’s preowned retail sales set a record at 3,343 transactions, that was shattered last year with a total of 4,349. For 2022, “I’m projecting about 3,860 preowned business jets will have sold by the close of this&nbsp;year,” said Cardarelli. “But who knows? There could be a big surge in sales.&nbsp;We usually see that in the last quarter.”

 


The JetNet market report to be presented tomorrow—this will be “at least the 10th,” said JetNet iQ co-creator Rolland Vincent—will likely provide clues to how the year might close out. It includes third-quarter transaction numbers and JetNet iQ's&nbsp;quarterly survey of business aviation consumer sentiment, along with its 10-year sales forecasts for the new and preowned market.

 


Meanwhile, the&nbsp;company is reporting growing demand for its JetNet for Salesforce and JetNet API custom interfaces built atop its standard subscription-based Marketplace and JetNet iQ aircraft data services. The custom APIs enable subscribers to import JetNet’s proprietary data into third-party applications—or as Cardarelli put it, “liberate it, and extract the data they want when they want it.”

 


JetNet builds the portal specific to each client’s needs, with pricing tied to the elements incorporated. Representatives are at NBAA-BACE&nbsp;to talk to attendees about “what their needs are, and how JetNet can respond with an API tailored to their needs,” Cardarelli said.

 


Its Business Intelligence (BI) platform, previewed at Heli-Expo this year and launched at EBACE, is also getting the NBAA-BACE&nbsp;spotlight. BI’s graphic visualizations and interactive dashboards provide insight into business aircraft fleet statistics, flight activity, values, and JetNet iQ surveys and forecasts, among other data.

 


“This is going a step further than liberating JetNet data to be used in other applications,” said Cardarelli. “It makes actionable intelligence for clients.”

 


Created primarily for its OEM customers, BI is also drawing interest on Wall Street among “hedge-fund-type people,” said Cardarelli, who are looking for “correlations between aircraft utilization data and the movement of stocks.”

 


The JetNet Values program, created in partnership with Asset Insight, which includes tail-number-specific selling-price information, is also being highlighted this week at the show. A single-source asset valuation platform for preowned aircraft, Values combines key historical market data and sales prices with access to estimated residual-value figures produced by Asset Insight’s eValues product.

 


JetNet Values is aimed at preowned aircraft dealers and brokers,&nbsp;“where the rubber meets the road,” Cardarelli said. However, he added that it has applications for “anybody that's got anything to sell to an aircraft owner and operator.”

 


Demand for Values picked up as the preowned market soared during the lockdown. “People were really struggling to understand valuations of airplanes in the pandemic,” Cardarelli said.&nbsp;Due to sensitivities regarding real price information, Values is restricted to professionals involved with facilitating the market, which includes the finance community.

 


Additionally, the company's&nbsp;lightning-prediction product from Flash Scientific Technology, available through JetNet, is also being showcased at its booth. The system can predict lightning up to one hour in advance with 96.5 percent accuracy—a boon for airport-area and surface&nbsp;safety. JetNet has the rights to market the product in the aviation sector.

 


The Utica, New York-based company's burgeoning activity has been fueled by a majority growth investment this year by Boston-based private equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners. This marks the first time JetNet has accepted an outside&nbsp;equity investment since opening in 1988.

 


“We want to grow organically, but we want to grow inorganically as well," said Cardarelli.&nbsp;"That means we are looking at other companies that complement what we do, to acquire or enter partnerships with.”

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