Might be mistaken, but pretty sure boats were bought and sold long before the internet.

Remember going to the library and pulling out a pile of books to try and find an answer to a question?

my office is full of books that I once had to have and use...still use the parts books and shop manuals for equipment here but that's slowly changing. when I purchase new equipment it comes with a CD now and no books, I have to ask and pay for those. LOL. hell the last update on a frontend loader was done via gps !!

We had the Bargain Hunters Guide. It was a weekly classified little book that always had killer deals in it. Much better deals that are found today. The internet opened the entire world up to sellers, so items that were once found really cheap go for a LOT more money. Back around '97-2000, there were still many people who where not PC savvy and still sold via the local classifieds, I would buy up dirtbikes/cars/boats and list them on a relatively new format, ebay and make a killing flipping stuff. Deals are much harder to find these days.

In those days you hit up the Boat Shows and/or drove many miles, sometimes across multiple states, to go see boats at the larger dealerships.....or you just went to Shooters and drank as you picked out the boat you were gonna buy next. Never forget the first time I saw an Apache idling up there, it was just so raw and bada$$.

Cheers,

Dave

Back then... there was no better deals for buyers than the way repo cars and boats were handled. A bank would take something back , put it in their lot or some building, and put a notice in some paper that they were going to auction it off in a week or so. The auction usually was run by some bank employee that did not know squat about what was being sold...... very few bidders would show up and items were bought cheap.

I laugh when I think of some of the steals I got!!!

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Used to go to the Miami show every year before the web and go home with all the latest info and what was going in the boat next. Went to the show a few years back and looked around at everything I had already seen on the web. The show is still great but some of the excitement was gone.

I remember going to the MIAMI show in like 80/81. There was a (formerly) nice MAGNUM that had delaminated badly parked out front and spray painted down the side was a rip on Magnum and their construction and lack of warranty coverage. Bet Magnum didn't sell one boat that year.

Now a days we could read all the back and forth BS here. I Guess(?) it's an upgrade?

At LOTO I've really seen the change from the sheer volume, or lack thereof, of people on the lots. Not that boats aren't getting sold, just seems like the days of the "prop spinners" wasting a boat salesman's time is gone. Used to see tons of people in the lots sniffing around the boats on the lots... just not so much anymore.
I still spend my fair share of time mulling the free rags that everywhere down there but then go to the web to find out more about the boat and just save myself the drive and headache of dealing with the lot patrol.

keeping my collection of boating magazines dating back from the late 70's, just in case aliens zap our power grid and no boating content would be available online,haha.