Guide
Engine hours: the adjustment that dominates most powerboats
Updated
Hours are the first thing every buyer asks and the thing they most often misread. What matters is the ratio, the records and the water.
Hours against expectation
Two hundred hours on a twenty year old boat is not reassuring, it is a sign of long idle periods, which are their own problem. Eight hundred on a well-serviced coastal boat can be unremarkable.
Enter your own normal in the calculator rather than accepting a general rule, because normal differs enormously between use patterns.
Records beat the number
A logbook, service invoices and a compression test move a buyer far more than a low reading on a meter that could have been replaced.
If the records exist, present them. If they do not, expect the discount that absence earns.
Fresh or salt
Corrosion history sits behind almost every engine and fitting question, and a freshwater boat of the same age and hours is genuinely worth more.
Berthing history is checkable and worth documenting, because a buyer who cannot verify it will assume the worse case.
The repower question
At some point a buyer prices the boat as a hull plus a repower. Knowing where that point sits for your engine tells you whether to sell now, repower first, or price for the buyer doing it.
It is a specific question for a marine mechanic on your specific engines rather than a general rule.