Boat Brief
AI-Powered Due Diligence for UK Canal Boats
8 followers
AI-Powered Due Diligence for UK Canal Boats
8 followers
Boat Brief helps prospective buyers with due diligence for canal boats in the UK. The system can review any boat advert for potential red flags. It uses this to generate a bespoke checklist to help buyers know the right questions to ask during the viewing. It also searches public records, compares the asking price with similar listings, and provides cost estimates for licensing, insurance, and any urgent repairs. All of this gets packaged into a helpful report with beginner-friendly guidance.
How current is the pricing comparison data, and does it pull from live listings or a cached database that could miss recent changes?
@beratzgll Hi Berat! It pulls from live listings across the internet. There are lots of factors that affect boat prices, but age and length are a good starting point for comparison. The system flags if the boat you're considering falls outside the typical range and provides commentary on why the asking price may or may not be justified.
How does it actually pull in the public records data, and does it cover narrowboats only or also sailaway cruisers and widebeams? Wondering how thorough the report is for older or modified boats that might not have clean documentation.
@azatboav Hi Azat - great questions. Yes, it includes GRP/fibreglass cruisers and widebeams too - basically anything in the UK's inland waterways system. There aren't many public record sources, but they can still be insightful. Some data is retrieved programmatically from specific endpoints (querying stolen boat databases, for example), but the LLM agent also does a targeted web search. Oftentimes this finds where the listing has been republished (in Facebook groups, for example), sometimes with additional or even conflicting details. In testing, it's found older adverts with a higher asking price (a sign of reduction or a desperate seller), blog posts about boat maintenance made by a prior owner, and even public photo-sharing sites where the boat happens to be in the background of an image. Taken together, these sources can be helpful for corroborating seller claims and building a more complete picture of the boat's history.