Podcast: The Truth About the Market
Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF
Why Correctly Priced Aircraft Sell—and Overpriced Airplanes Sit
A listener went shopping for a mid-’90s Piper Archer.
Low time. No damage history. Original paint. Original panel. Engine approaching TBO, but overall a nice airplane.
The seller was asking $189,000, down from an original $199,000.
VREF put the airplane at roughly $165,000.
The buyer was prepared to offer $175,000 cash—and says he would have gone to $180,000.
He never even got to make the offer.
According to the listener, the broker told him he was wasting his time, dismissed the VREF number, and insisted the Archer would be the next airplane to sell.
That was June.
By the end of September, the airplane was still on the market.
The new asking price?
$165,000.
The seller rejected the possibility of a $175,000 cash deal only to ask $10,000 less three months later—after paying another three months of hangar, insurance, ownership costs, and calendar time on an engine already approaching TBO.
And one line from the listener’s email stuck with Jason:
“I doubt his clients know.”
That is the real subject of Episode 61.
Not that the piston market is collapsing.
It isn’t.
The data tells a stranger—and much more useful—story:
There are two piston markets operating at the same time.
Aircraft priced to actual market data are moving.
Aircraft priced to yesterday’s expectations are sitting.
And which market your airplane enters may be determined by one decision made before the listing ever goes live:
The number on day one. Pasted text
In this episode
Jason breaks down the current Part 91 piston market—from Archers and Skyhawks to Cirruses, Mooneys, and Bonanzas—and explains why tight inventory can coexist with seven-month listing times.
- Why the aggregate piston data does not support a market-crash narrative
- Why used piston-single inventory is down year over year while asking prices remain roughly flat
- How aircraft can sit six or seven months even when overall inventory is relatively scarce
- Why Jason believes there are effectively two piston markets
- The difference between airplanes priced to transaction data and airplanes still anchored to 2021–2022 expectations
- How the extraordinary 2020–2022 run-up rewired seller expectations
- Why a seller’s highest remembered value can become an expensive psychological anchor
- How free listing-site valuation widgets can reinforce inflated asking prices
- Why Jason describes the resulting feedback loop as a hall of mirrors
- Why VREF values are built from closings rather than asking-price averages
- Real-world asking-price spreads among Piper Archers, Cessna 172s, Cirruses, Mooneys, and Bonanzas
- Why two apparently similar airplanes can be listed tens—or even hundreds—of thousands of dollars apart
- How new-aircraft replacement cost can support used values without making every used asking price defensible
- Why flight-school fleet economics are becoming increasingly important to the piston resale market
- What happens when heavily utilized school aircraft begin returning to the retail market
- Why 10,000–16,000-hour training aircraft require buyers to think in cycles and usage, not simply total hours
- How higher interest rates, down-payment requirements, and lender appraisals are reducing the effective buyer pool
- Why an appraisal below the asking price can suddenly require a buyer to produce tens of thousands of additional dollars in cash
- Why installed avionics rarely return their full invoice cost several years later
- How insurance costs narrow the buyer pool for higher-performance piston aircraft
- Whether appraisers are really “too low”—or sellers are simply pricing above the closing market
- A second Archer negotiation involving a large ask-to-VREF gap, a rejected cash offer, and a proposed direct wire to the seller’s operating account
- Why Jason says aircraft buyers should use escrow rather than remove transaction protections simply to get a deal done
- How the same listener ultimately bought a privately listed SR20 priced near VREF—and closed within weeks
- What that SR20 purchase teaches about pre-buys, engine risk, and post-closing holdbacks
- How buyers can structure offers so brokers have a harder time filtering or dismissing them
- What sellers should ask their broker before accepting an aspirational listing strategy
- And why time does not rescue an overpriced airplane for free
The market isn’t flooded
Jason starts by rejecting the simplest narrative:
“The piston market’s flooded. Nothing is selling. Prices are falling off a cliff.”
That is not what the aggregate numbers in the episode show.
Used piston-single inventory is described as down roughly 17% year over year as of July, continuing a trend of year-over-year inventory declines.
Asking prices are roughly flat year over year—not behaving like a market in free fall.
Cirrus inventory, in aggregate, also provides evidence of a reasonably balanced market in parts of the fleet.
And yet some aircraft are spending roughly six or seven months online.
That apparent contradiction is the heart of the episode.
Jason’s answer is simple:
Correctly priced aircraft sell. Mispriced aircraft sit.
The airplanes that close disappear from the listing sites.
The ones priced too high remain visible month after month.
So if you evaluate the market primarily by scrolling listings, you can end up studying the slowest-moving portion of the market and mistaking it for the market itself. Pasted text
The listing page is a museum of airplanes that haven’t sold
Jason’s critique of asking-price-based valuation is one of the episode’s central themes.
A seller opens a listing site.
They look at similar aircraft.
They see the high asks.
A free valuation widget averages visible listings.
That number validates the seller’s expectation.
The seller lists at that number.
The aircraft sits.
Then that same listing becomes part of the visible market used to justify the next seller’s price.
Jason describes the mechanism as a hall of mirrors.
The tool creates an aspirational value.
The aspirational value creates a listing.
The listing stays online because it does not clear.
Then the stale listing helps inform the next valuation.
The market begins quoting itself.
VREF, Jason argues, is designed in the opposite direction:
Start with what actually sells.
That distinction explains one of his strongest claims in the episode:
“If you price it at VREF, it will sell in 90 days or less.”
His reasoning is not that the VREF number is deliberately conservative.
It is that the buyer, lender, and appraiser are more likely to converge around a number grounded in actual market activity.
When buyer and seller are using compatible numbers, transactions happen.
When they are not, time does the negotiating for them. Pasted text
The 2022 number is still living in sellers’ heads
Why do sellers keep doing this?
Jason points back to the extraordinary piston run-up from late 2019 through 2022.
He describes piston and light-aircraft asking prices rising roughly 30% over that period after years of relatively stagnant appreciation.
For owners accustomed to seeing little movement in their airplane’s value, the experience was dramatic.
Then came another problem:
The market began cooling before seller psychology did.
Jason says he publicly argued in April 2022 that many complex and high-performance piston segments had already hit a ceiling or plateau by late 2021.
But asking prices continued climbing.
That peak became the anchor.
The seller remembers the highest number they ever saw associated with their airplane.
Everything below it feels like losing money.
But:
The market does not care what you paid.
It does not care what your airplane was briefly worth at the top.
It does not care what the airplane in the next hangar is asking.
And every month spent defending the anchor creates additional carrying cost.
Piper Archer: one model, radically different asking markets
The Archer examples illustrate the problem vividly.
Jason describes 34 listings and highlights aircraft of similar vintage with radically different asking prices.
One mid-’90s Archer is around $165,000.
Another similar-generation aircraft is asking approximately $245,000.
A private seller has a later aircraft listed around $140,000.
Jason’s conclusion is not that every low-priced airplane is automatically the correct value.
It is that these aircraft are plainly not being offered into the same market.
Some are priced to transact.
Others are priced to wait.
And the Archer from the episode’s opening ultimately became its own evidence:
The broker rejected the idea that VREF’s ~$165,000 figure was legitimate.
Three months later, the seller was asking approximately that exact number.
Cessna 172s: replacement cost meets training history
The 172 market introduces another factor:
Replacement economics.
Jason notes that a new Skyhawk is around the $600,000 level in the market context discussed in the episode.
That high replacement cost helps support used-aircraft pricing.
But it does not mean any asking price becomes defensible.
He points to listing examples ranging from late-1990s aircraft to recent 172Ss and a 2007 training aircraft with more than 16,000 hours.
The high-time trainer becomes important later because total time alone does not tell the story.
A school aircraft may be maintained extremely well.
But training airplanes accumulate enormous numbers of takeoffs, landings, student inputs, door cycles, seat-rail cycles, nose-gear events, and other repetitive wear.
Jason’s point:
The pre-buy becomes the number.
On a heavily utilized school airplane, condition cannot be inferred from a listing page.
Cirrus: proof that even one brand can have two markets
Cirrus provides perhaps the clearest example of market segmentation.
Jason distinguishes late-model SR22 Turbo G6 aircraft—where supply can remain tight and desirable examples retain pricing support—from SR20 G6 aircraft, where he describes materially greater supply pressure.
He also discusses G7 pricing sitting extremely close to, or in some cases above, the cost of new production.
His advice in that situation is straightforward:
If the used asking price is essentially new-aircraft money, shop the prior generation or compare directly against buying new.
One important transcript note: the recording appears to say that “80%” of the SR20 G6 fleet is for sale. That figure is anomalous relative to the surrounding discussion and should be verified against the source data before being published as a statistic. Pasted text
Mooney and Bonanza: enormous spreads inside the same model families
Jason uses Mooney Ovations and Bonanzas to demonstrate how far asking-price dispersion can stretch.
Similar model years can be separated by six figures.
In the G36 market, he describes aircraft from roughly the same period ranging from the low-$500,000s toward $800,000.
The pattern looks remarkably similar to the Archer examples:
Some owners are pricing for the current buyer.
Others appear to be pricing from the memory of 2021–2022.
That distinction creates what Jason calls the two-speed market.
Flight-school fleets may become the next major piston variable
Flight schools provided enormous support for the trainer market over the last several years.
Schools bought new airplanes.
They bought used airplanes.
They competed with private owners for clean Archers and Skyhawks.
That competition helped support prices.
Jason believes two forces now deserve attention.
First, the economics of putting a $500,000+ aircraft into primary training are getting harder.
Second, aircraft purchased during the training boom have now accumulated thousands of hours and some are beginning to re-enter the market.
That matters because when a fleet operator sells multiple similar aircraft simultaneously, those airplanes become real competition for the private seller.
A private owner cannot simply say:
“My airplane only has 1,800 hours, so those 4,500-hour school aircraft aren’t my comps.”
A lender or appraiser may still consider the supply they introduce into the market.
Financing is changing what buyers can actually pay
The seller sees an airplane.
The buyer sees an airplane plus financing.
Jason describes certified piston financing in the upper-6% range and higher, with published rates for smaller piston loans reaching roughly 7–10%.
Down payments matter.
Loan-to-value limits matter.
And lender appraisals matter enormously.
His example:
Suppose a seller asks $785,000.
The lender appraises the aircraft at $700,000.
The lender’s advance is based on the appraised value—not the seller’s ask.
Suddenly the buyer has to produce far more cash than expected.
The buyer may love the airplane.
The bank may be willing to finance the airplane.
But the gap kills the deal.
Then everybody blames everybody else.
The aircraft remains online.
The avionics invoice is not the aircraft-value increase
Jason calls avionics one of the major sources of bad asking-price math.
An owner spends $60,000 installing a panel.
A few years later, they mentally add the entire $60,000 to what they believe the airplane should be worth.
But installed equipment depreciates.
Jason gives the example that a $60,000 panel several years old might contribute something closer to $30,000 in value.
The exact contribution varies.
The principle does not:
Cost is not value.
The market determines how much of the upgrade survives into resale.
Are appraisers actually causing deals to fail?
Jason takes on an industry argument that appraisal methodology may be lagging the market and producing values that are too low.
He concedes something important:
In a rapidly rising market, comparable-sales methodology can lag.
If values move rapidly and the available transactions are several months old, the appraiser can be structurally behind the market.
That was a legitimate concern in 2021–2022.
But Jason argues that the current market described in Episode 61 is different.
Aggregate asks are roughly flat.
Inventory remains relatively constrained.
Some segments are moving.
Others are sitting.
In that environment, when an appraisal repeatedly lands materially below an asking price, his view is that the more likely explanation is:
The asking price is above the clearing market.
The lender has to care about the closing market because the lender may eventually have to sell the airplane.
Archer #2: price wasn’t the only warning
The listener encountered another late-’90s Archer.
The asking price was just under $260,000.
VREF put it around $192,000.
The listener offered approximately $215,000 cash—more than $20,000 over VREF.
The offer was rejected.
But Jason focuses just as heavily on the proposed transaction structure.
According to the listener, the seller was willing to transfer the bill of sale while the buyer wired money directly to the seller’s company operating account and suggested skipping the title company.
The pre-buy also had to occur where the aircraft sat.
The listener walked.
Jason’s response is unequivocal:
Use escrow.
Not because every seller proposing a direct wire is dishonest.
Because the entire point of escrow is to protect the parties when you do not know what could go wrong.
The cost of a title search or failed deal is trivial compared with removing the safeguards from an aircraft transaction.
Then the same buyer found the other market
Eventually the listener stopped pursuing the Archers.
He found a low-time 2005 Cirrus SR20 offered privately at approximately $239,000, essentially around the VREF figure described in the episode.
He performed a pre-buy.
Some discrepancies were found.
The transaction ultimately closed around $228,000.
The same buyer.
The same cash.
The same VREF methodology.
But this airplane closed in weeks.
That is Jason’s entire two-speed thesis in one transaction:
The airplane priced to the data moved.
The overpriced aircraft remained online.
The pre-buy cannot see everything
The SR20 story has another chapter.
After closing, engine problems emerged that Jason says a reasonable pre-buy would not necessarily have discovered.
The owner is now sending the engine for overhaul and replacing the original avionics.
By the time the work is complete, his total investment may approach $330,000 on an airplane acquired for $228,000.
Jason draws two lessons.
First, on an older airplane with meaningful engine uncertainty, buyers should at least consider negotiating a holdback or reserve escrow for post-closing issues.
Second, aircraft ownership is not purely financial.
The listener knowingly continues investing because he loves the airplane and intends to own it.
That is perfectly rational from an owner’s perspective.
But it does not mean every dollar invested becomes another dollar of resale value.
How Jason would structure a serious piston-aircraft offer
For buyers, Jason recommends making the offer difficult to dismiss:
- Put the data inside the offer. Attach the VREF report and relevant comparable listings rather than leaving the evidence in an informal email.
- Put a clock on it. Give the offer a defined expiration period—Jason suggests around seven days—so it requires an actual conversation.
- Invite evidence. Tell the seller that if there is maintenance, equipment, logbook, overhaul, or other information supporting a higher value, you are willing to review it and revise the number.
- Be willing to walk away—and return later. If the listing eventually falls below your rejected offer, make another written offer. Ninety days of carrying cost can change a seller’s perspective very quickly. Pasted text
What sellers should do differently
Jason’s advice to sellers is equally direct.
Price to the closing market, not the listing page.
Ask your broker how much of their inventory has been listed for more than 120 days.
Calculate the real cost of sitting.
Hangar.
Insurance.
Annual reserves.
Engine calendar exposure.
Market movement.
Your time.
Jason estimates that a $250,000 piston airplane sitting for three months can easily accumulate $5,000–$8,000 in carrying cost before considering any change in market value.
The seller who rejects $175,000 and sells months later for $165,000 did not successfully “hold the line.”
He paid to lose.
And before listing, Jason recommends obtaining a defensible independent value so you know approximately where the buyer’s lender and appraiser are likely to land before the financing process tells you.
What Jason says he does not know
One of the more important parts of the episode is the limitation Jason puts on his own conclusions.
Public piston closing prices are not broadly available.
The aircraft-specific listing examples he discusses publicly are asking prices, not published closing-price ledgers.
VREF has transaction information underlying its values, but Jason says he cannot simply broadcast individual private sale prices.
So when he calls a particular listing “priced to sit,” he is making an inference from asking-price dispersion, days on market, and VREF’s underlying valuation data.
He explicitly labels that as an inference rather than pretending it is an independently published closing record.
He also acknowledges scenarios that could move the market the other way.
Inventory could tighten further.
Flight-school demand could remain stronger than expected.
Scarcity could eventually force buyers upward toward currently aspirational asks.
The point is not that every seller must cut tomorrow.
The point is to watch the evidence instead of defending the narrative.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the piston aircraft market crashing?
No. The data discussed in Episode 61 does not support a broad piston-market crash.
Used piston-single inventory remains relatively tight, asking prices are roughly flat year over year, and buyers are still active. The more useful way to describe the market is that it has split into two speeds: aircraft priced to current market evidence are moving, while aircraft priced to older expectations are sitting.
Why are some airplanes sitting for six or seven months if inventory is tight?
Because low inventory does not guarantee that every asking price will clear.
The airplanes that sell disappear from the listing sites. The overpriced airplanes remain visible month after month. That can make the public listing market look much slower than the transactional market actually is.
Jason’s shorthand is:
Correctly priced aircraft sell. Mispriced aircraft sit. Pasted text
Why can asking prices be so far apart for similar aircraft?
A large part of the spread comes from different seller expectations.
Some owners are pricing to current market evidence. Others are still anchored to values established during the 2021–2022 run-up.
That can create enormous differences between similar aircraft. In the Archer examples discussed in the episode, similar-generation airplanes were offered at roughly $165,000 and $245,000, while another private listing was around $140,000.
Are online aircraft valuation widgets accurate?
They may be useful as a starting point, but Jason argues that sellers should understand what the number is actually based on.
If a tool is primarily informed by public asking prices, it can create a feedback loop: high asking prices inform the valuation, the valuation encourages another high listing, and that unsold listing becomes part of the visible market used by the next seller.
VREF’s approach, as described in the episode, is built around what actually sells rather than simply what gets listed.
Why does VREF focus on closed transactions instead of asking prices?
An asking price tells you what a seller wants.
A closed transaction tells you what a buyer was actually willing to pay.
That matters to buyers, appraisers, and especially lenders, because a lender needs to understand what the aircraft could realistically sell for if it ever had to be repossessed and liquidated.
Can an aircraft appraisal come in too low?
Yes—particularly in a rapidly rising market.
Jason acknowledges that comparable-sales methodology can lag when prices are climbing quickly and the most recent closed transactions are already several months old.
But he argues that the current piston environment is different. When some aircraft are still selling while others with large ask-to-appraisal gaps remain online, the more likely issue may be that the asking price is above the clearing market.
Does the cost of an avionics upgrade add dollar-for-dollar to aircraft value?
Usually not.
The amount an owner spends on an upgrade and the amount the market adds to the airplane’s resale value are two different numbers.
Jason gives the example of a $60,000 panel that, several years later, might contribute something closer to $30,000 in resale value.
The exact amount depends on the installation, equipment, age, aircraft, and market.
The principle is simple:
Cost is not value.
How do higher interest rates affect piston aircraft values?
Higher rates reduce affordability and can shrink the effective buyer pool.
The buyer is not simply evaluating the purchase price. They are also dealing with down-payment requirements, loan-to-value limits, insurance, and the lender’s appraisal.
If an aircraft is listed at $785,000 but appraises at $700,000, the lender calculates its advance from the lower value. The buyer may suddenly need significantly more cash to close, which can kill an otherwise viable transaction.
Are high-time flight-school aircraft automatically bad airplanes?
No.
Jason specifically cautions against treating high total time as an automatic red flag.
A school aircraft may have been maintained very well. But training use creates a different wear profile because the aircraft experiences far more takeoffs, landings, student inputs, gear cycles, seat-rail cycles, door use, and other repetitive stresses.
That is why Jason’s takeaway for a heavily used training aircraft is:
The pre-buy becomes the number.
Could flight-school aircraft coming back to market affect private sellers?
Yes.
Flight schools have been major buyers of Archers, 172s, and other trainers. If fleets begin disposing of aircraft accumulated during the training boom, that creates additional supply.
A privately owned low-time airplane may still be worth more than a heavily used school aircraft, but the school aircraft can still influence the competitive environment, lender analysis, and available alternatives for buyers.
Should I wire money directly to an aircraft seller?
Jason strongly recommends using escrow.
That does not mean a seller requesting a direct wire is necessarily dishonest. The point of escrow is that neither side has to rely entirely on trust when a large amount of money and an aircraft title are changing hands.
In the episode, the listener walked away from an Archer transaction after being asked to wire funds directly to the seller’s company operating account while bypassing the title company.
Can a pre-buy inspection catch every expensive problem?
No.
The listener ultimately purchased an SR20 after a pre-buy, but engine problems emerged after closing that Jason says a reasonable inspection would not necessarily have discovered.
That experience leads him to suggest that buyers of older aircraft with meaningful engine uncertainty consider negotiating a holdback or reserve escrow for certain post-closing risks when appropriate.
How should I make an aircraft offer that a broker cannot easily dismiss?
Jason recommends four things:
- Put the valuation data and comparable listings directly in the offer.
- Give the offer an expiration date.
- Invite the seller to provide evidence supporting a higher value.
- Be willing to walk away—and come back later if the market changes.
The goal is to move the discussion away from opinion and toward evidence.
How should I price my airplane if I want it to sell?
Jason’s advice is to price to the closing market, not simply to other public listings.
He also recommends asking your broker how much of their inventory has been listed for more than 120 days and calculating the real cost of waiting.
Hangar.
Insurance.
Annual reserves.
Engine calendar exposure.
Market movement.
Time.
He estimates that a $250,000 piston aircraft sitting for three months can easily generate $5,000–$8,000 in carrying cost, before accounting for any decline in market value.
Does an airplane sitting on the market mean the entire piston market is weak?
Not necessarily.
One of the central points of Episode 61 is that individual listings can behave very differently from the broader market.
An aircraft sitting for months may be evidence of a pricing problem, not a market-wide demand problem.
The better question is not:
“How is the piston market?”
It is:
“How is my model, my configuration, and my asking price performing against current market evidence?”
What is the biggest mistake piston-aircraft sellers are making right now?
According to Jason, it is pricing to the memory of the market rather than the market that exists today.
The 2021–2022 peak created powerful expectations. But the current buyer is also dealing with financing costs, lender appraisals, insurance, competing inventory, and current transaction evidence.
The airplanes priced to current data are moving.
The airplanes priced to the old peak are waiting.
The number on day one can determine which market you enter.
The bottom line
The piston market is not crashing.
It is sorting.
Inventory remains comparatively tight.
Aggregate asking prices are relatively stable.
Demand still exists.
But sellers and buyers are increasingly separated by valuation expectations, financing costs, appraisal realities, and the lingering psychological anchor of the 2021–2022 market.
The aircraft priced to current data are moving.
The ones priced to the memory of the peak are sitting.
Jason’s listener looked at two Archers.
One broker dismissed the VREF number. That airplane later fell below the buyer’s intended offer and still had not sold at the time of the episode.
Another seller wanted significantly more than the data supported and proposed eliminating escrow protections. That aircraft remained unsold as its ask fell toward the seller’s own cost basis.
Then a private seller listed an SR20 near VREF.
It closed in weeks.
Same buyer.
Same cash.
Same market.
The difference was the number on day one.
If your airplane has been sitting since spring, Jason’s question is simple:
Which market are you actually in?
And if you don’t know, stop asking the listing page.
Know the number before the market teaches it to you
VREF Online gives aircraft owners, buyers, brokers, lenders, and appraisers access to current aircraft values, historical values going back decades, operating-cost information, and the market context behind the number.
Price to the market—not the memory of it.
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Fly safe. Stay smart.
