Rani Awad

BRETT FORRESTER| Q&A
comes in. Some aircraft sales and purchases take
a long time to complete, but the right answers,
given promptly, are the key to good business. This
is what Jet Sense specializes in.
Q: How important to Jet Sense is the forging
of partnerships with other organizations?
A: Partnerships are vital and a key component
for us. They are a great way of leveraging additional
capabilities and amplifying our reach, resources,
and skills base. We have excellent partnerships
in the USA, in South Africa, and in Europe. Our
partners contact us, they tell us a client is looking
for a particular type of aircraft, they ask if we can
we help, and we always try to succeed for them.
Q: In employee terms you are still a modest
sized business. What are your ambitions?
A: We have four employees right now and we
rely significantly on our partnering deals, which
we do a lot of, to generate momentum for us.
Working together with the network of partners we
have built makes us feel larger. We attend EBACE
and NBAA to make sure that we fly the flag for
Jet Sense.
Partnerships are vital for us. They are
a great way of leveraging additional
capabilities and amplifying our reach,
resources and skills base
Brett Forrester
Q: What is your sense of the market right now?
A: What we see is that some prices are still
falling, while in other categories, some stability is
returning. There are buyers out there, and there
have been every year since the crash of 2008. You
just have to have a pretty competitive aircraft to
sell and you need to know what it is that your buyers
want. If a guy wants a low time aircraft you
are never going to sell him a higher time aircraft,
and vice versa.
Another clear trend in the market is that banks
do not like funding aircraft that are over 15 years
old. They really push clients towards newer aircraft
if they are going to want to finance their purchase
- and everybody these days wants to finance a purchase
rather than paying cash. Jet Sense has the
ability to help with the financing.
Q: Are you seeing pre-owned aircraft selling
faster these days?
A: If your aircraft is competitively priced, I
would say that four to six months would be the
typical market time for a sell. When you purchase
an aircraft, as we do, for onward sale, you have
to know where the current market is with a fair
degree of precision. In this we take more risks than
the average broker, but we support this risk position
with an extensive amount of market research.
Then there is the subjective element. People
have to feel that they are getting value for their
money. However, everyone measures this differently.
If an aircraft has very low time on it and
has hardly been flown, do they see value in paying
$1 million more for a little less flight time on the
aircraft? Some people will value that greatly, while
others will not.
The aircraft that move the fastest, are the
ready-to-go airplanes, with new interiors, upgraded
avionics and state of the art in-flight entertainment
systems. If you put these things into your
aircraft, you may not get dollar for dollar return
on that investment, but it will certainly accelerate
the sell time. If you put $1 million into upgrades,
you may only see an $800,000 return on that investment,
but you gain the benefi t to the speed of
the sale. Most buyers just want to buy the aircraft
and start using it and are unwilling to wait four or
more months for a refit.
Q: Are you planning on growing your head
count soon?
A: We definitely need more personnel as our
workload continues to grow, but partnering deals
allow us to the ability to power through excessive
work periods. We are always open to more partnerships.
We already essentially have an office in
South Africa, given our partnering deals there, and
we would like an office in Europe soon, and one in
South America. But all this will come...
Autumn 2015 | International 75