Every business is a bit different and how people conduct that business varies as well. The best way to fully understand the Yachtcouncil system functionality, purpose and abilities, is to set up a time when a Yachtcouncil Sales Representative can contact you. This way they can also show you how to streamline some of your everyday process. Outlined are some of the features YachtCouncil has to offer. Yacht Council Limited (the Council) was formed in June, 2000, to take advantage of the existing professional organizations in the brokerage industry to pull together a cohesive, effective group of yacht brokerage professionals and facilitate the more effective use of the these new developments. There are currently seven professional yacht broker associations are members Yacht Council Limited, Florida Yacht Brokers Association (FYBA), Mediterranean Yacht Brokers Association (MYBA), Yacht Brokers Association of America (YBAA), California Yacht Brokers Association (CYBA), Northwest Yacht Brokers Association (NYBA), British Columbia Yacht Broker Association (BCYBA) and Association of Brokers, Yacht Agents (ABYA). More about the IYC Three Associations got together to help form the IYC. These main three associations saw the benefit in being part of a global, all encompassing association. The IYC main goal is to protect, educate and serve the brokerage industry. The IYC has mostly the same goals as the association you are in; however combining all the regional associations under one umbrella will wield them strength. To pay for all these great intentions the IYC needed to come up with an inexpensive way to ensure a significant amount of income can be obtained easily. They felt the best way to accomplish this would be to create something tangible, functional and a means to protect the very essence of the yacht brokerage industry — the broker’s viability and the information the broker collects. Since the advent of the Internet the information regarding vessels on the market has become fragmented as well as unreliable. Even though there are systems that help market your vessels well, those types of system do not have any controls in place to ensure data integrity. The majority of those sites also focus on the consumer market and not the actual broker. The vision for the system was simple; bring the latest technologies to the brokers so they can streamline the selling process. The system was designed as a true MLS — and we are dedicated in helping you. Over time the Yacht Council MLS has become rich with features. All the features within the Yacht Council system were requested by our membership, your peers. One of our earlier accomplishments was to ensure the presentation of the yachts or list of yachts were presented with the utmost professionalism, and with the least amount of human intervention. Too many brokers had to keep a separate word document about their listing, this way they could ensure a proper presentation was sent to their client. The Yacht Council system displays and prints utilizing the latest technologies to ensure the best presentation with the least intervention. The Yacht Council System also has different layouts to meet our different members demands. If your customer would like full specs on a particular yacht you could either send them the information using our brochure Layout 1 format or our brochure Layout 2 format. The layout 1 format intermingles the pictures with the appropriate text within a listing. To view a sample of our brochure Layout 1, click here. We also have a brochure Layout 2, which puts all the pictures at the end of the document. The pictures are increased in size so two pictures fit on a single page. Layout 2 also provides more basic specifications on the vessel than Layout 1 does. To view a sample of our brochure Layout 2, click here. When searching the Yacht Council system for available inventory it was asked by numerous members to supply more information on the Yacht Council vessel list page. In-doing this, you are able to get an informative quick glance at all the vessels with out having to go into each listing to ensure it matches your client's needs. In the Yacht Council system, when viewing the list of vessels available, you can find up to 40 pieces of information on that vessel. Most other systems show less than 15 pieces of information. When printing a list of potential yachts for your client, you can be assured that the information is presented in a professional presentation. You have multiple layouts to choose from, below are a few examples: To view a sample of our single line report, click here. To view a sample of our multi line report, click here. Brokerage firms market themselves through a variety of ways, one being their web site. Just like all systems Yacht Council offers an easy interface solutions to your web site. Getting consumers to visits your web site is an ongoing project for all firms and in some cases marketing dollars are used. If by accident or by direct marketing a consumer visits your site, would you want to market another site that could possible have a negative effect on your bottom line? Of course not, that is why when you use the Yacht Council search engine with your web site you will not see any reference to the Yacht Council site, like you do if you use other systems search engine functionality. The second biggest advantage to using the Yacht Council templates is the ability to change the look and feel of the information being displayed so that it matches your site. This can be simply done by changing the color of the background (click here to view an example) or shuffle the information around so the templates conform to your web sites layout (click here to view an example) or completely change the way the information is presented (click here to view example and or click here to view an different example), or just simply leave the layout as it comes (click here to see an example). Another advantage of using the Yacht Council templates within your site is the ability to direct your clients to a specific vessel or list of vessels. If you sent your client a list of vessels from the Yacht Council system the consumer would have the ability to click on the vessel; which then they would be direct to your web site and placed directly on the vessel of interest. To view a sample of this, click here. Once the pages loads click on a vessel. All of this without our web site logo on your site, or a standard format that everyone uses and one that probably does not match your sites look and feel. Does your company put together marketing materials for boat shows or just a special personalized handout on the yachts you offer? Why do these things every time a boat show comes around or when you list a new yacht, let the Yacht Council System work for you. If you would like your own special Brochure layout, let us create it for you, this way every boat that you print from the Yacht Council system will be in your company’s special format. To view a sample of a customized brochure, click here. Large file. A lot of our members have special marketing layouts for their boats. One of our members asked us to put a photo gallery brochure together where they could select the images they wanted to include, in the order they wanted and which pictures where placed on what page. Prior to joining the Yacht Council system they would have to create this photo album for each vessel they listed and store it somewhere. Now they just hit a button in the Yacht Council system to retrieve it. To view a sample image gallery brochure, click here. Boat shows are notorious for wasting a lot of valuable time getting all the proper marketing materials together. Why not have a system in place that pulls the information you already entered and allows you to format your marketing materials the way you like it. One of our members requested that we make Vessel Post cards. At the boat show this member has a large hanging multiple business card holder. They insert the Yacht Council Business cards into the holder so they can display all the vessels that they have listed. Instead of editing their template due to price changes or creating a new template for the new vessels they list, they now just push a button in Yacht Council. To view a sample Vessel Business Card, click here. Over the years the brokerage industry has changed. Brokers today don’t just sell and list boats; they also provide a variety of valuable services to their clients. Yacht Council is aligning themselves with different services that the broker can provide to their clients. For example if you have a client in Europe and they would like to purchase a Yacht in the United States, you have access to a shipping service. Fill out a quick form on the Yacht Council System and a shipping representative will call you with a quote. We are also teaming up with a company that will help you document the vessel for your client. Just fill out a form and a documentation specialist will call you to forward the proper forms that are required. All these services allow our members to be more competitive, offer different services, and maintain their professional standards. In the past Yacht Council's main focus was to streamline the selling and listing process for its members by focusing on new technologies that would help the member stay ahead of the consumer. As this will always be our primary focus we also realized part of that process was to attract consumers to our member’s vessels. Most Internet shoppers shop on the web. At first we advertised in the Main Stream Publications. The cost of placing a full page / four color add was expensive when looking at the traffic it brought to the site. Before placing any adds the consumer site of Yacht Council (http://www.yachtcouncil.com/) was attracting 2,000 visitors a day. When we place the magazine adds in the different publications, that only brought our daily average up to 2,100 visitors a day, an increase of a hundered visitors a day. We then turned to the search engines to purchase certain keywords. We started buying keywords on the search engines, which brought our daily activity up to 6,000 visitors a day. We were pleased with the activity however the costs were skyrocketing and the ROI was not paying off. We then decided to drop the keyword advertising and started to focus on getting to the top of the search engines using the old method — hard work.    Yachts for sale — # 5 Yacht for sale — # 1 Used yachts — # 3 Used yachts for sale — # 2 Sailboats for sale — # 1 Used Sailboats — # 7 Used sailboats for sale — # 8 Trawlers for sale — # 1 Used Trawlers — # 3 Used trawlers for sale — # 1 New Yachts — # 3 New Yachts for sale — # 1 New trawlers — # 5 New trawlers for sale — # 2 Cruisers for sale — # 5 New sailboats for sale — # 1      Viking yachts — # 3 Hatteras yachts — # 6 Hatteras Yachts for sale — # 5 Viking Yachts for sale — # 1 J boats — # 3 J Boats for sale — # 1 Sea Ray Yachts for sale — # 5 Sea Ray Yachts — # 4 Bertram Yachts — # 9 Tiara Yachts — # 3 Carver Boats — # 20 Grand Banks yachts — # 21 Motor Yachts for sale — # 1 Power Boats for sale — # 13 Motor Boats for sale — # 9 GulfStar Trawlers — # 4    Yachts for sale — # 3 Yacht for sale — # 3 Used yachts — # 4 Used yachts for sale — # 3 Sailboats for sale — # 15 Used Sailboats — # 1 Used sailboats for sale — # 1 Used Trawlers — # 1 Boat for sale — # 2 New Yachts for sale — # 2      Hatteras Yachts for sale — # 9 Viking Yachts for sale — # 3 Yacht — # 4 Yachts — # 4 Sea Ray Yachts for sale — # 4 Motor Yachts for sale — # 5 Power Boats for sale — # 8 Motor Boats for sale — # 5 New trawlers for sale — # 1 New sailboats for sale — # 8 There are many other keywords that we rank high on as well. In focusing our efforts to the search engine rankings, we went from 6,000 visitors a day to nearly 12,000 visitors a day. Our visitor traffic is continually growing, and soon the Yacht Council site will become one of the most recognized sites for this industry. We are far from done; we are continually working on improving our positioning as well as adding more searchable keywords. Spell Checker Customizable text formatting Detail Traffic analysis Customer Management Multiple listing layouts Multiple output forms — HTML, MSWord, Excel, and PDF Boat Show reports Sold Vessel reports Unlimited Pictures Unlimited VR Tour Streaming Videos User Friendly Email and Print capabilities within 1 click Default preferences settings Trophy Customer database Searchable United States Coat Guard database Searchable United States terrorist database Because we are contractually linked to the International Yacht Council there are a few safeguards put in place on your behalf. All price increases must be approved by the IYC. This means that we cannot raise the price of our service without first getting written permission by the IYC. A part of your membership fees goes back to the IYC so they can better serve you! It does not stop there; your industry will receive 10% of all gross revenue generated by the yachtcouncil.org system and the yachtcouncil.com site. Only brokers that are a member of one of the 7 different associations, described above, can subscribe to the Yacht Council system. In doing this you can feel comfortable when doing business with any or all of the members on Yacht Council as they all abide to some code of ethics. Help us support your industry and allow us to help streamline some of your business procedures utilizing the latest technologies. Don’t be a follower, be a leader. Join today and start utilizing the tools offered to you so your company can stand out from the rest. Call us at +1.561.671.9997 or email us at info@yachtcouncil.org today and find out how the Yacht Council system can benefit your company.