Rising time-to-sale reads like a cooling market. It is describing the opposite, and the distinction determines whether you are a bidder or a spectator.
Average time on market for preowned business aircraft reached 98 days on a trailing-twelve-month basis this spring, up more than 11 percent year over year. Read in isolation, that is a straightforward signal: aircraft are taking longer to sell, which means demand is softening and buyers are gaining leverage.
Read alongside everything else happening in the market, it means almost exactly the reverse.
In the same period, preowned business jet median values rose 3 percent. Inventory compressed rather than building — the fleet-for-sale ratio fell roughly 9 percent year over year, with jets available at approximately 6.6 percent of the active fleet against a historical average nearer 8.2 percent. In the ultra-long-range segment the ratio reached 3.88 percent, down from 5.36 percent a year earlier, against roughly 10 percent that the industry treats as structural equilibrium.
Values up. Inventory down. Time to sell up. Those three facts only reconcile one way.
The aircraft accumulating days on market are the ones nobody wants at the asking price. The desirable ones are not accruing days, because they are not on the market.
The average is being pulled upward by an aging tail. Roughly three-quarters of for-sale inventory is now sixteen years or older, against 57 percent a decade ago. That inventory sits, and sits, and it drags the mean. Meanwhile the quality airframes — late-model, well-maintained, sensible pedigree — increasingly transact before a listing ever exists. A broker with relationships knows what is quietly available. An owner considering a sale takes a call rather than commissioning a marketing campaign. The transaction closes between parties who were already in contact.
So the market has effectively bifurcated into two markets that share a statistic.
Older, harder-to-place aircraft. Three-quarters of listed inventory is sixteen years or older. Days accrue. Buyers have time to deliberate — on the aircraft nobody is competing for.
Desirable airframes that never list. Decided among a small number of parties on a short fuse — and the seller selects on probability of close, not price alone.
Nearly every serious buyer wants to be in the second market. A great many of them are structurally excluded from it, and not for reasons of credit.
Consider how an off-market opportunity actually unfolds. A broker calls with an airframe that has not been listed and will not be. There are two or three other parties aware of it. The seller is choosing among them on some combination of price and certainty — and certainty, in practice, means how confident the seller is that this buyer will actually close, on the timeline discussed, without a financing contingency unraveling in week six.
A buyer who must begin arranging financing after identifying the aircraft is competing against buyers who arranged it before. That buyer is not slower. In the seller’s assessment, they are less certain, which is worse.
This is the part that owners consistently underestimate. A sixty-to-ninety-day financing process is entirely workable when you have an exclusive and an accommodating seller. It is not workable at all when three parties are interested and the seller is selecting on the probability of close. In that scenario the financing timeline is not a back-office detail. It is the qualifying criterion.
The compounding cost is what happens next. The buyer who loses the off-market aircraft does not simply wait for an identical one. Inventory is at 6.6 percent of the fleet; there may not be an identical one. So the search extends, and extends, and eventually resolves in a compromise — an airframe with more time, or a less suitable cabin configuration, or a higher price because the market firmed while the search continued.
None of that appears in a financing comparison. A buyer can tell you precisely what rate they were quoted. Almost none can tell you what the six-month search extension cost them, or what they gave up on the airframe they eventually bought.
The macro backdrop makes this unlikely to ease. OEM backlogs run 18 to 24 months for popular models, routing anyone who needs capability now into a preowned market that is not replenishing at the rate it is being drawn down. The global ultra-high-net-worth population continues to grow at better than 5 percent annually. U.S. corporate profits hit a record near $3.9 trillion in the first quarter. Business jet deliveries rose nearly 12 percent in 2025, with industry billings reaching the highest figure ever recorded.
Demand is not the problem. Supply is, and the supply that matters most has largely stopped being publicly visible.
Which means the practical work of acquiring an aircraft in this market happens well before an aircraft is identified. It happens when the buyer establishes, in advance, the capital capacity and the relationships that let them say yes inside three weeks — including on airframes with hours and age that a conventional lender will hesitate over, and through ownership structures that a conventional lender treats as exceptions.
The buyers doing this are not paying more. They are simply the ones getting the call.
First National Capital Corporation has completed more than $1 billion in aviation financing, with closings measured in weeks and underwriting handled directly — including high-hour aircraft and complex ownership structures.