The pre-owned market tightened this year, and condition is doing more work

Pre-owned inventory has tightened to 6.6 percent of the fleet and the average aircraft is taking longer to sell than it did a year ago. When there is less to choose from and each one sits longer, the things that separate two similar aircraft stop being cosmetic and start being commercial.

The numbers here come from JETNET’s mid-2026 market snapshot. The reading of them is ours.

The numbers

From JETNET iQ, published late July 2026:

• Pre-owned inventory at 6.6 percent of the fleet in the first half of 2026, down from 7.3 percent in 2025
• Average days on market around 98 days on a trailing twelve month basis to June 2026, up 5.6 percent year over year
• Aircraft aged 0 to 5 years sold in 54 days. Aircraft 16 years and older took over 100 days
• 1,115 pre-owned transactions in the first half of 2026, down 10.8 percent on the same period in 2025
• Average asking prices: small jets 3.21 million dollars, down 1.6 percent. Medium 5.27 million, down 5.2 percent. Large 12.63 million, down 15.7 percent

For context on the other side of the market, GAMA counted 854 new business jet deliveries in 2025, up 11.8 percent, with total delivery billings of 35.7 billion dollars.

What the shape of it means

Three things are happening at once and they pull in different directions.

Inventory is scarce. 6.6 percent is tight. In a genuinely soft market you see double digits. Fewer available aircraft ought to favor sellers.

Transactions are down and days on market are up. Which cuts the other way. Less is trading and what trades takes longer.

Large cabin asking prices are down 15.7 percent. The steepest move in the set, and it is the segment where a single aircraft represents the most money.

Put together, that is not a hot market or a cold one. It is a selective one. Buyers are there, there is not much to look at, and they are taking their time over what there is.

The age split is the number to sit with

54 days for a 0 to 5 year old aircraft. Over 100 days for one 16 years or older. Nearly double.

Some of that is systematic and has nothing to do with condition: newer aircraft have fewer inspections coming due, cleaner records, current avionics, remaining warranty. Nobody is confusing a well-kept twenty year old aircraft with a new one.

But within an age band, the aircraft are competing on what distinguishes them. And in a market where a buyer has three candidates instead of twelve and is prepared to wait, presentation and documented care are doing work they do not do in a market where everything moves in a month.

Note carefully what JETNET does and does not say here. The report attributes none of this to condition or cosmetics. That connection is our reading from working on aircraft that are being sold, not something in the data.

What actually changes for an owner

If you are selling into this. Your aircraft will be viewed alongside a small number of alternatives by somebody with time. Every avoidable question costs you days, and days are the currency in a 98 day market. The useful work is not a deep clean the week before, which reads as staging. It is arriving with a history that answers the question before it is asked. What an inspector actually reads into condition is here.

If you are buying. Scarcity is not a reason to skip a proper pre-purchase inspection. It is a reason to expect one to take longer and to budget for what it finds. And look hard at the belly and the gear wells, because that is where deferred care actually lives and it is where a seller’s preparation least often reaches.

If you are holding. This is the group most of our clients are in, and the honest read is that a market like this rewards not needing to sell. Large cabin asking prices down 15.7 percent is not a moment to be forced into a transaction. What it is a moment for is not letting a maintenance-level problem become a recovery-level one, because recovery costs are the same regardless of what the market is doing.

The one number we would actually watch

Days on market by age band, next year. If the gap between the newest and oldest bands keeps widening, that is a market getting more selective, and in a more selective market the difference between two similar aircraft matters more each year.

If it narrows, buyers are reaching further down the fleet and condition matters less at the margin.

We are not market analysts and we would not want anyone making a transaction decision on the basis of a detailing company’s blog. What we can say is what we see on the ramp, which is that the aircraft coming to us in a hurry are almost always the ones about to be looked at by somebody, and the ones we have had on a program for years never need the hurry.

If you are working towards a sale on a known timeline, tell us the date and we will work backwards from it rather than doing everything at the end.