A familiar scene at the Monaco Yacht Show - and a commission question nobody has a clean answer to

Anyone who spends a few days on the docks in Monaco during the Monaco Yacht Show has seen this: the same prospective buyer walking the same yacht twice, three times, with a different broker each time. It's not hidden. Captains know it, crew know it, the brokers themselves are usually aware of it too. It's simply how the show works; buyers are shopping brokers as much as boats.

Which raises a question that comes up constantly but is rarely resolved cleanly: if that buyer eventually makes an offer, who is entitled to claim a commission?

Is the sign-in sheet enough?

Most yachts on display keep a log of who comes aboard and with whom. It feels like objective evidence. But a sign-in sheet tells you who walked someone onboard. It doesn't tell you who built the relationship with the buyer, who understood their actual requirements, who did the follow-up calls, or who structured and delivered the offer that the seller received.

Treating the log as proof of entitlement conflates presence with contribution and that gap is exactly where disputes start.

Is sending a brochure or a presentation enough?

This comes up just as often. A broker sends a client a PDF presentation of a yacht on display, sometimes before the show, sometimes the same week. Weeks later, a different broker delivers the actual offer to the seller. Does the first broker have a claim? A presentation isn’t nothing, but it isn’t negotiation, it isn’t relationship management, and it isn’t the work that turned interest into a binding offer.

Whether that first contact is enough to establish the broker as the “effective cause” of the sale — the test courts typically apply — is genuinely fact-dependent. But even that isn’t the whole picture. Being the effective cause only matters if there was an agreement in place entitling the broker to commission in the first place. Without a contract — express or implied — between the broker and their principal, the effective cause analysis never gets off the ground. And in the show environment, where introductions happen quickly and relationships form informally, whether such an agreement actually exists is often the threshold question that determines everything else.

Who actually qualifies as a “selling broker”?

This is less straightforward than it might appear. The term gets used loosely and a “broker” is considered to be anyone who introduces a buyer, facilitates a viewing, or participates in negotiations. But whether that description carries legal weight depends on more than self-identification.

Was there a co-brokerage agreement with the Central Agent? Was the broker acting in a professional capacity, or simply making an introduction as a favour? Did the seller or the Central Agent ever acknowledge them as a broker entitled to share in the commission?

The MYBA framework doesn’t define who qualifies as a co-operating broker but it simply provides a mechanism for the Central Agent to share commission with one if they choose to. That leaves the question of status to be resolved by conduct, correspondence, and (ideally) written agreement. In practice, it often isn’t resolved until there’s a dispute.

And in some places, being a broker at all requires a licence

Yacht brokerage is not uniformly regulated. In the UK, there is no statutory licensing requirement and anyone can hold themselves out as a yacht broker. But that isn’t the position everywhere.

In the United States, several states require yacht brokers to hold a licence, and in some cases to be bonded. In France, commercial agents (including brokers) are subject to registration requirements. Other jurisdictions impose their own rules. This matters because in a jurisdiction that requires licensing, an unlicensed broker may find their commission claim unenforceable, not because they weren’t the effective cause, but because they lacked the legal capacity to act as a broker in the first place.

At an international show like Monaco, where brokers, buyers and sellers come from different jurisdictions, the question of which regulatory regime applies — and whether the broker meets its requirements — can add a further layer of uncertainty to an already complex picture.

Under a standard MYBA Central Agency Agreement, the Central Agent has the contractual right to commission from the seller. Any payment to a co-operating broker (often called a “selling broker”) depends on a separate co-brokerage arrangement between the brokers. The MYBA framework contemplates this, but the terms are negotiated case-by-case rather than standardised, and often not disclosed to the buyer or seller. The split frequently tracks the relationship between the two brokers rather than the value each one actually contributed. As long as a deal closes smoothly, none of this gets examined. It surfaces only when there's a dispute — at which point it often turns out there was no written co-brokerage agreement in the first place.

None of this has a settled answer. That's precisely why show week produces more of these disputes than any other part of the calendar.