Optimism Around Used Market Still Justified Despite Tariffs: Jetcraft

Anyone about to buy or sell an asset as expensive as a business jet is going to want to base their decisions on as thorough an understanding as is possible to obtain about how the market is likely to behave in the foreseeable future. Yet predicting anything with certainty is becoming ever more difficult. Just ask the authors of Ever Forward, Jetcraft’s report on the pre-owned business-jet market.

While much of the document is taken up with verifiable statistics relating to completed transactions, a great deal of the annual publication’s point and purpose is its identification of trends and its cautious predictions about future market performance. Yet even the team who have written the report—the 11^th the aircraft broker has produced—were caught on the hop by the early 2025 announcement by the U.S. government of tariffs on almost all foreign-made goods imported into the U.S.—including on aircraft.

“Our report was admittedly written prior to the tariffs,” says Chad Anderson, the firm’s CEO and one of Ever Forward’s six authors. “So, its optimism predated the tariff discussion.” But, he argues, that optimism is not misplaced.

“The demand curve—people’s requirement to travel—I don’t foresee that need changing,” he says. “So, you’re going to have to solve one way or another. Are airlines a solution? Typically, not. We’ve seen that decade over decade over decade.”

The underlying fundamentals, Anderson says, still justify the report’s forecasts, which predicts a 5.8% increase in the number of transactions, and 2.8% increase in their value, over the next five years. A key factor has been a re-baselining of the market after the overheated and unsustainable rise in prices, and constraints in supply, during the pandemic.

“We came off two to three years of extraordinary imbalance, with plenty of demand and a lack of supply, and it just caused all kinds of disruption,” Anderson says. “It was good if you were a seller, but it was painful as a buyer. And it was also limiting in the number of transactions any one of us could commence, simply because we didn’t have enough supply. That shift back to a relative level of balance allowed buyers more supply to pick from, and it also allowed us to return to a level of predictable depreciation. We all love it when our assets only go up in value, but that isn’t sustainable.”

Alongside this necessary reset, he says, has come the pandemic’s other big impact on the sector: a significant rise in the number of new entrants to business-aircraft ownership, including many younger buyers. That demographic made up 15% of the market 10 years ago, but by the end of 2024 almost a third of transactions—29%—involved buyers aged 45 or under. They are buying the aircraft that are being sold by corporates who have returned to the marketplace and are the main buyers of new aircraft.

“What we’re seeing is the makeup of buyers really shifting in an interesting way,” he says. “You have corporates returning and then you have, in the ultra-high-net-worth segment, an amazing influx of younger buyers—a larger number of female buyers as well, which is needed and it’s refreshing. If you’re a 40-year-old airplane buyer, you’re probably going to buy five or six airplanes in your life. [This allows] a very remarkable ability to predict the future because most people don’t exit aircraft ownership altogether. They may change their buying appetite along the way—for instance, we have seen buyers have multiple aircraft to keep one airplane and then [use fractional operators] for supplemental lift and so forth. There’s always variations on the scene, but very seldom do they exit aircraft ownership altogether. So, it gives us a good strong baseline for us to be able to predict from.”

Still, with the overwhelming majority of transactions—64% of the 11,202 analyzed in the report—taking place in the U.S., some impact from the ever-evolving tariff situation is inevitable. Working out how that will affect future market conditions remains more art than science, but Anderson is willing to hazard a few cautious proposals as to likely outcomes.

“In the short term, U.S. buyers are likely to favor American-manufactured aircraft and those already based and registered in the U.S., as we understand these to be exempt from tariffs,” he says. “In that sense, the tariffs may achieve their intended goal—keeping U.S. capital within the domestic economy.”

A “temporary pause” in demand may well be followed by a rise in prices, as happened during the pandemic and its aftermath, Anderson suggests. If this is not great news, it is at least something the market and those involved in it have had recent and instructive experience of. “While this is not an ideal scenario, it is one we have successfully navigated before,” he says.