Podcast: The Truth About the Market
Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF
Two numbers:
$656,688.
And:
$1,101,694.
Same asset class. Same week. Nearly identical examples.
One number reflects the statistical benchmark built from actual recorded transactions.
The other is what a seller is asking today.
The gap?
Approximately 68%.
And there are examples asking even more.
The asset is a Ferrari 812 GTS—but this episode is not really about Ferraris.
It is about something aviation professionals see every day:
An illiquid market can manufacture the appearance of value without ever discovering a price.
In Episode 53 of The Truth About the Market, Jason steps outside aviation to expose a pricing mechanism that becomes even more dangerous when applied to aircraft.
One seller sees another seller’s asking price.
Then prices higher.
The next seller sees both.
Then prices higher again.
Soon, the entire visible market appears to agree on a number that no actual buyer has ever paid.
Asking price references asking price.
Listing references listing.
Hope references hope.
And somewhere downstream, that manufactured number gets repeated often enough that someone starts calling it “market value.”
That is what Jason calls the listing cascade.
And if you buy, sell, broker, finance, insure, or appraise aircraft, you have almost certainly seen it before.
In this episode, we cover:
- How a Ferrari market ended up with asking prices roughly 30% to 80% above its transaction benchmark
- Why the visible market can look dramatically stronger than the market of actual closed sales
- The difference between a statistical benchmark, an asking market, and a verified transaction
- Why the highest public asking price may tell you almost nothing about where buyers will actually transact
- How a market can have multiple seven-figure asking prices even when the recorded transaction history has never supported those numbers
- Why the most visible prices in an illiquid market often carry the least evidentiary weight
- How asking prices become self-referential
- Why one optimistic seller can influence the next seller without ever completing a transaction
- How an entire market can establish a “consensus asking price” without establishing a clearing price
- Why Jason calls that consensus a survey of hope denominated in dollars
- How asking prices can eventually get laundered into appraisals, financing decisions, insurance schedules, and legal disputes
- Why averaging active listings does not automatically produce market value
- Why an appraisal supported primarily by asking prices may amount to little more than “a screenshot with an invoice attached”
- Why the problem does not necessarily require fraud, manipulation, or dishonest sellers
- How simple reference error can cause a market to lose track of its true anchor
- Why genuine price discovery runs from transactions to asking prices—not the other way around
The listing cascade
Jason breaks the process into a simple chain.
One seller lists high.
The aircraft, car, or other asset does not sell.
But the listing remains visible.
A second seller sees the number and decides their asset deserves slightly more.
A third seller sees both listings and assumes a new market level has been established.
Soon there are enough high asks that a fourth seller believes they are simply “pricing to market.”
But nobody has actually transacted there.
That is the critical distinction.
The market has created:
A consensus asking price.
It has not created:
A repeatable transaction price.
Why the counterexample matters
Jason compares the Ferrari market with another collectible-car segment where asking prices have been adjusting downward toward actual transactions.
Same broad buyer demographic.
Same economy.
Same interest-rate environment.
Same types of marketplaces.
But a very different pricing behavior.
That comparison matters because it suggests that runaway asking prices are not always the result of a broad speculative mood.
Sometimes the problem is local.
Thin supply.
Few closings.
Patient sellers.
And a transaction record too quiet to discipline increasingly ambitious asking prices.
The fewer transactions there are, the easier it becomes for visible listings to overpower the evidence.
Scarcity does not just affect price.
It can weaken price discovery itself.
Then Jason brings the lesson back to aviation
- Aircraft markets contain almost every structural ingredient required for a listing cascade:
- Thin comparable sales
- No centralized public transaction tape
- Confidential closings
- Wealthy sellers capable of waiting
- Highly emotional ownership
- Few truly comparable examples
- Long sales cycles
- Asking prices that remain visible long after successful transactions disappear from public view
Jason makes an important distinction:
A wide spread between asking price and closing price is not automatically a red flag in aviation.
In aircraft transactions, that spread is normal.
The market has operated that way for decades.
A listing sitting well above eventual closing value is not necessarily evidence of a bubble.
It may simply be Tuesday.
Why public aircraft listings are structurally misleading
When a business jet closes, the actual sale price is often confidential.
The ownership change may become visible.
The transaction price usually does not.
Meanwhile, the airplanes that have not sold remain online with their asking prices clearly displayed.
That means the public-facing aviation marketplace is structurally biased toward:
Unsold inventory and aspirational prices.
Successful transactions disappear.
Holdouts remain.
Jason describes it as a kind of reverse survivorship bias.
The public market is not showing you a representative sample of aircraft value.
It is showing you the inventory that has not cleared.
That is why aircraft buyers, lenders, insurers, and appraisers cannot reliably determine value by scrolling active listings alone.
The three-condition test
The intellectual center of Episode 53 is Jason’s framework for identifying when normal aviation-market optimism becomes something more serious.
A wide asking-to-closing spread is not enough.
Jason looks for three conditions moving together in the same aircraft segment.
Condition One: The spread is widening
Not simply:
“Are asking prices higher than closing prices?”
They usually are.
The important question is:
Are asking prices moving farther away from actual transaction values than they were six months ago?
Direction matters.
Condition Two: Days on market are increasing
Aircraft are not simply priced optimistically.
They are sitting.
The disagreement between sellers and buyers begins showing up in time.
The same tail numbers remain listed.
Price reductions appear.
The listing survives month after month.
The calendar becomes evidence.
Condition Three: Closed transaction volume is thinning
Fewer buyers are accepting the asking structure.
Deals stop happening.
The market votes by refusing to transact.
Volume becomes the thermometer.
One condition is noise.
A widening spread can be caused by a few unrealistic sellers.
Longer days on market can be seasonal.
Lower transaction volume can be caused by interest rates, elections, financing conditions, or temporary uncertainty.
Two conditions deserve attention.
But when all three move together:
Widening spread.
Longer days on market.
Fewer closings.
Jason says you may be watching an asking structure detach from its transactional foundation.
That is the aviation version of the listing cascade.
Why the test must be run by segment
There is no single aircraft market.
Light jets behave differently from midsize jets.
Midsize behaves differently from heavy.
Individual models and vintages can behave very differently from their categories.
A healthy segment can mask a weak segment when both are averaged together.
That is why broad “the market is up” or “the market is down” reporting can be misleading.
The test needs to be run against:
Your model.
Your vintage.
Your segment.
Not an industry-wide average.
What VREF’s data is showing
Jason points to current transaction data to illustrate why the framework matters.
Year-to-date business jet transaction volume is down substantially.
Light jets are down.
Midsize jets are down even more sharply.
Heavy-jet transaction activity is also lower.
At the same time, inventory as a percentage of fleet has been increasing in portions of the market and days on market have been stretching.
That is the setup for what Jason has discussed in previous episodes as a standoff.
Sellers remain anchored to an older or more optimistic pricing environment.
Buyers refuse to meet them there.
Prices do not immediately collapse.
Instead:
Deals stop happening.
And transaction volume reveals the disagreement before asking prices admit it.
New aircraft and used aircraft are different markets
Jason also warns against applying the same framework blindly to new-aircraft order books.
OEM backlogs are fundamentally different from active used-aircraft listings.
A factory backlog represents:
- Signed contracts
- Deposits
- Delivery obligations
- Real counterparties
- Actual commitments
That does not mean a backlog cannot weaken.
But it fails differently from a wall of unsupported asking prices.
The real danger comes when sellers borrow credibility from the new-aircraft backlog to justify unrelated used-aircraft pricing.
New-aircraft demand does not automatically establish the resale value of a used airplane.
The least price-discovered market in aviation
Jason argues that the Ferrari-style listing cascade may appear in its purest form in one particular aviation market:
Delivery-position trading.
When an owner controls a future delivery slot and offers that position at a premium, what establishes the premium?
There is typically:
- Little public transaction history
- No centralized record of completed slot trades
- No transparent benchmark
- Very limited observable closing data
So one quoted slot premium can begin referencing another quoted slot premium.
Then another.
And another.
At that point, the market can become almost entirely self-referential.
Then the cascade can jump markets
A quoted premium on a future delivery position can begin influencing the asking price of a nearly new aircraft.
The owner thinks:
If buyers are supposedly paying a huge premium just for the right to wait for a future delivery, my aircraft is available right now.
Surely mine should be worth at least the factory price plus that premium.
Now an unverified asking price from one market has become the anchor for an asking price in another.
Jason describes it as:
Two layers of hope. Zero closings.
That is how manufactured value can move from one market into another.
How to run the test on your own aircraft
Jason leaves listeners with a practical framework.
Ask three questions.
1. Is the spread widening?
Are asking prices pulling farther away from actual closed transactions?
And crucially:
Do you actually have closed-sale data?
If someone supports a valuation entirely with aircraft currently for sale, you may be watching the listing cascade happen in real time.
2. Are days on market lengthening?
Are the same airplanes still listed months later?
Are sellers repeatedly reducing asking prices?
Jason’s view:
A price that gets “improved” three times was never really a market-clearing price.
It was an opening position the market declined to accept.
3. Is closed transaction volume thinning?
How many actual aircraft changed hands compared with the same period last year?
Not listings.
Closings.
If asking prices remain firm while transaction activity falls sharply, Jason warns that what looks like market strength may actually be:
A standoff wearing strength’s clothes.
What different participants should do
For sellers, a segment showing all three warning signs may require pricing from actual closings rather than neighboring listings.
A high asking-price consensus cannot pay carrying costs.
For buyers, closed comps and days on market can provide stronger negotiating leverage than another seller’s asking price.
A seller can disagree with your opinion.
It is much harder to argue with months of their own unsold listing history.
For lenders and insurers, residual assumptions anchored primarily to active listings may create unsupported collateral values.
That risk can remain invisible until the market finally forces price discovery.
The bottom line:
An illiquid market can look expensive without actually proving that buyers will pay expensive prices.
That is true in collector cars.
It is even more important in aviation.
Because aircraft do not have the same transparent auction history or public transaction tape available in many other markets.
The appearance of value can persist for months—or years—before actual transactions force the market to reconcile.
So do not ask:
“What is everyone asking?”
Ask:
“What is actually selling?”
Then watch three things:
Is the spread widening?
Are days on market increasing?
Is transaction volume thinning?
One condition may be noise.
Two deserve attention.
All three moving together can tell you something important about the market before the asking prices ever do.
Because the market does not care what you are asking.
It only cares what sells.
The next VREF aircraft value update goes live September 1.
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VREF it before you make the call.
The market does not care what you paid.
It only cares what it is worth.
Fly safe. Stay smart.
