Tinder for aircraft brokers

opinion

by Alasdair Whyte

August 8, 2025

Pictured is a Praetor 600, similar to one offered for sale by OffMarket.Aero. (Photocredit: Embraer).

Tinder is the clear market leader in online dating. But there are niche apps for people who work in specific industries. There is Food Service Singles for those who work in food hospitality and are looking for love (they struggle to date because they have too many reservations), Muddy Matches for those who want to date farmers and Uniform People for medical staff and first responders (they should have called it Sirens).

This week a new site launched for aircraft brokers called Offmarket.aero. It is a dating site for brokers looking to sell aircraft discreetly (even if it sounds like it designed for people looking to have an affair). Brokers can see the rough details of an aircraft or say they are in the market for a particular type, but it keeps the actual aircraft private.

“Brokers already have a WhatsApp group of people they trust from their sphere, so when they are marketing off-market aircraft they know they are dealing with trustworthy people,” says Martin Spiegl, founder of aircraft technical consultancy JetLeg and the creator of OffMarket.Aero. “They want to be able to broadcast the availability of the aircraft while keeping the privacy of the aircraft owner and the aircraft. They want to distribute with genuine brokers who may have a buyer and not bedroom brokers with Gmail addresses looking to steal the mandate. We are just trying to make this easier.”

Launch the site

Spiegl decided to launch the site just six weeks ago after a broker friend told him how they lost the mandate in this way.

Brokers marketing an aircraft on the site list basic details, but not enough to identify a single aircraft. If another broker is interested, they click to register this.

The seller then gets to see who that broker is. “Then you can ignore – because you don’t want to deal with that person, just like swiping left on a dating site, or you can reveal your identity. You have a small messaging option, or you can just call or move onto WhatsApp or the phone.”

The site launched this week and has one Embraer Praetor 600 listed. Some 50 brokers have applied to take part, including 20 founding brokers who have to approve new members.

“I reached out to a group of trustworthy brokers and they control who can join,” says Spiegl. “When you apply to join you need to two references from the founding members to agree. If you can’t get two references you won’t get access. This is to keep out all the Gmail brokers.”

Spiegl hopes that the site will get to around 30 off-market aircraft at one time. The site is free for brokers with service buyers able to join for a fee.

“Brokers are the ones putting the food on all of our tables, they bring the deals, they have the client contact,” says Spiegl. “There are enough sites charging brokers for listings.”

‘Dirty underbelly of aircraft sales’

The term off-market is divisive. “I prefer saying discretely marketed but there is a mystique in the term off-market. In reality, it often describes the dirty underbelly of the aircraft sales market,” says one broker who is part of the Offmarket.aero founding committee. “As soon as an owner says that they are open to offers, but not marketing it, everyone with an iPhone who aspires to be an aircraft broker is suddenly out there shopping it.”

The broker says he was advising a buyer earlier this year and was offered the same off-market aircraft from 22 people. Pretty much all of them told him they were the only ones who knew about it being for sale. “I called the aircraft’s owner to say why don’t you give an exclusive mandate to stop this? But they could not see why it was a problem,” says the broker.

If the site is a success, Spiegl has plans to launch new products and refine it. Hopefully this is the start of niche dating sites like Riveting Love (finding airframe technicians a partner), and Boring Companions (for people who do engine pre-purchase inspections). Swipe right if you are interested.