AvBuyer's Chris Kjelgaard asks industry experts what conditions they reckon will prevail in the market for pre-owned business aircraft in 2025.
Barring a major geopolitical event or environmental calamity, 2025 should prove to be a year of price stability and healthy trading levels for the younger examples of the world’s fleet of pre-owned business aircraft. Such is the view of four senior aircraft traders...
But the outlook isn’t anywhere near as rosy for business aircraft which have been in service for 20-plus years as the pre-owned market settles back to what insiders consider a “normal” state of buying and selling activity.
The aircraft brokers see the market in North America, and particularly the US, continuing to dominate pre-owned aircraft for sale activity. And not only will activity in the US domestic market continue at a high level, but internationally the US will be a net accepter of pre-owned business aircraft from around the globe.
The hungry US market is expected to particularly look to Europe for pre-owned jets and turboprops, partially because European Business Aviation is under an increasingly intense spotlight from the continent’s environmental organizations and governments.
While much of that scrutiny is uninformed and unfair, the pressure is anticipated to continue to result in used aircraft leaving the European fleet to make their way elsewhere – particularly to the US (for smaller and larger aircraft alike) and to the Middle East and Asia (for large business jets).
Current & Near-Future Used Aircraft Market Conditions
Tony Theis, Vice President of Sales, Acquisitions and Consulting for Central Business Jets, notes the market for used business aircraft has become much more stable in 2024, with the buying frenzy prevalent during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic calming.
“What Central Business Jets is seeing is that prices have really come back to a healthy stabilization,” he adds. “They have come down about 10% across the board from the highs of 2021 to 2023.”
In the globally dominant US market, growth has been very modest in 2024, because the US’s GDP has stagnated and could even end the year down. “The thing we do know that affects the [used] aircraft market is not the stock market, but the GDP of the economy,” Theis continues. “We see growth when we get over the 2% range” in GDP growth.
Because the US GDP is not growing at a strong clip, Theis reckons "we are not seeing 4-6% growth” in the aircraft market as a result. Additionally, he says “we’re seeing discounts because aircraft...were too highly priced” during the pandemic-led trading bubble.
That said, the market “is still up quite a bit from pre-COVID levels and we’re still seeing very healthy numbers” of inquiries for Central Business Jets’ listings of aircraft for sale, he says, revealing his company received about 30 inquiries for a Bombardier Challenger 300 it listed the previous week.
While most were from individuals or companies who were “just curious” about the aircraft, five or six were from those who were “really thinking of upgrading” to a younger or bigger aircraft.
Overall, he adds, the healthy state of the used-aircraft market is benefiting from the fact that the “OEM backlogs [of new aircraft on order] are stable and really healthy – the OEM market drives the used market”.
Business Aircraft OEMs Hold Fire
According to Johnny Foster, President & CEO of OGARAJETS, today business aircraft manufacturers are all boasting orderbook backlogs of 18-24 months at current production levels.
This article was originally published by AvBuyer on November 5, 2024.