The market is quietly marking itself down

Ask ten brokers where the used-aircraft market is heading and you'll get ten confident, contradictory answers. The advantage of watching a live marketplace is that you don't have to guess — you can read what sellers are actually doing to their own asking prices, in real time, across the whole fleet.

Here is what fyiAero's data shows right now: 13,049 aircraft listed for sale, and among the listings that changed price in the last 60 days, 851 cuts against 485 increases. That's roughly 64% of all price moves heading down. It is not a crash — the average markdown on a mover is only about a percent — but the direction is unambiguous. After the pandemic-era run-up that emptied inventory and pushed values to records, the used market has spent the last stretch letting the air out slowly.

The signal isn't the price — it's the direction of the moves

A single asking price tells you almost nothing; sellers ask what they hope for. The useful signal is the ratio of cuts to raises across thousands of listings. When more sellers are lowering than lifting, buyers have leverage and time; when the ratio flips, inventory is tightening and hesitation costs money. It's the aviation equivalent of watching a housing market by counting price-reduced flags, not median list prices.

Break the last 60 days of price moves out by category and the softness is broad but uneven:

fyiAero marketplace, trailing 60 days. Categories with fewer than ~20 moves omitted.

Jets: the top of the market is cooling fastest

The most striking line in that table is the top one. Among jets that moved on price recently, 90% of the moves were cuts — twenty-seven down, three up. That fits the wider story of the last year: the frenzied business-jet demand of 2021–2022 has normalized, inventory has rebuilt, and the buyers who remain are patient and well-advised. With a median jet asking price of about $3.15 million (and an average dragged up past $5.7M by the heavy iron), even a modest percentage cut is real money, and sellers are increasingly the ones blinking first.

Turboprops are softening too but hold up better — the in-production stars (TBM, PC-12) still command attention and thin discounts, while older King Airs and legacy singles carry the markdowns. It's the same pattern that runs through every category: desirable, in-production, well-equipped airplanes resist; everything else negotiates.

Pistons: a big, liquid, slowly-easing market

The piston fleet is where most transactions happen, and it's easing gently rather than dropping. Single-engine pistons — 3,400-plus listings, the deepest pool on the market — show a median asking price near $300,000 (the average runs higher, near $430K, pulled up by new-ish Cirrus and turbocharged singles). Multi-engine pistons sit at a median around $352,000, with a long tail of aging cabin twins doing most of the discounting.

The composition matters as much as the average. The market is dominated by a handful of makes — Cessna, Cirrus, Piper, and Beechcraft together account for the large majority of piston listings — and within those, the split between modern glass-panel airframes and 40-year-old legacy aircraft is really two different markets wearing the same category label. Glass, low-time engines, and clean logs hold value; steam gauges and run-out engines carry the cuts.

Median asking price, live listings priced over $10,000. fyiAero marketplace.

How to read a value in a softening market

When the tape is drifting down, the gap between asking price and transaction price widens — sellers anchor to yesterday's comps, buyers price tomorrow's. That makes the discipline of valuation more important, not less. Three anchors keep a number honest:

• Published wholesale/retail guides. Aircraft Bluebook and VREF remain the industry's baseline references — the same figures lenders lend against. They set the center of gravity; they don't capture your specific airplane's condition.
• Live comparables. What similar make/model/year aircraft are actually asking today, and — more telling — how long they've been sitting and whether they've cut. A comp that's been listed for eight months at a price it keeps trimming is not a comp, it's a warning.
• Sold data. The strongest signal of all is what recently sold and came off the market, and at what final ask. fyiAero now tracks listings as they sell and preserves the final asking price and time-on-market, so an appraisal can lean on real exits rather than aspirational listings.

What it means, by seat

If you're buying: you have time and leverage, especially above the piston tier. Watch the cut history on a listing before you engage — a seller who has already trimmed twice is telling you where the real number is. Get the pre-buy; a softening market punishes hidden squawks harder because the resale won't bail you out.

If you're selling: price to the market that exists, not the one from two years ago. The listings that transact are the ones priced correctly on day one; the ones that chase the market down with a string of small cuts advertise their own desperation and sit longest. If your airplane is modern, well-equipped, and documented, you're in the resilient tier — lead with that.

None of this is a forecast, and aviation values famously turn on fuel prices, interest rates, and the broader economy in ways no dataset predicts. But the current tape is legible, and it says the same thing in every category: the market is quietly, methodically marking itself down — and rewarding the people on both sides of the deal who are paying attention.