Boat Listing Feeds Explained: OpenMarine, XML, CSV and Bulk Import for Brokers

Boat listing feeds: marina full of catamarans and yachts from above

Most brokerages with more than a handful of boats end up typing the same catamaran into four or five portals, then forgetting to take it down from one of them when it sells. Boat listing feeds fix that: you keep each boat in one place and the portals read it from there. This guide explains how syndication works, the formats and tools European and US brokers actually use, which fields and photo rules matter, how to keep sold boats from lingering, and how to start with nothing more than a spreadsheet.

Last checked: November 2026. Descriptions of third-party formats and tools are based on what their operators publish; we have not tested every integration. Check the current documentation and pricing with each provider before you build anything.

What boat listing feeds are

A feed is a machine-readable file or API that holds your stock list: one record per boat with its specs, price, description and photo links. A portal reads it on a schedule and creates, updates or removes listings to match. The point is a single source of truth. You edit the boat once, in your own system, and every channel follows.

There are two basic set-ups:

Pull. You publish a file at a fixed URL (usually XML, sometimes JSON or CSV), and each portal fetches it at agreed times. yacht4web, for example, accepts a file URL plus an import time and can run the import once or several times a day.
Push or hub. A listing tool sends your data to each portal through that portal’s interface. Boatvertizer, Swiss-made software that describes itself as a multiple listing service for boats, says it keeps ads in sync automatically on leading European boat portals.

Either way, the portal decides how often it reads, and that interval is the lag between “sold” in your system and “gone” on their site.

The formats and tools you will meet

There is no single global standard. What you use depends on where your buyers are and which software you already run.

Format or tool	What it is	Where it is used
OpenMarine XML	Long-standing XML schema for boat listings	Widely read by European portals; supported by CRMs such as EliteBrokers
NautiX	Newer interface developed by Boat24 and yachtall with other portals	Boat24 (free import for NautiX feeds) and other participating portals
Boatvertizer	Listing management and distribution software	European portals; included with a Boat24 dealer account
BoatWizard	Boats Group’s broker system, home of its MLS (now ProSeller Platform)	YachtWorld, Boat Trader, boats.com members
IYBA MLS feeds	REST JSON feeds from the brokers’ associations’ MLS	Members of IYBA, YBAA, CYBA, NYBA, mainly for broker websites
Portal-specific imports	Each portal’s own import from other portals or CRMs	Rightboat, TheYachtMarket and others

OpenMarine

yacht4web describes OpenMarine as the XML format used by the majority of European portals, and broker CRMs such as EliteBrokers use it to feed sites like Rightboat and Apollo Duck. Boat24, which backs a rival format, wrote in a blog post that OpenMarine dates from 2008, has seen little development since 2011 and is error-prone, and that customers complained about how slowly sold boats were removed. Boat24 still imports OpenMarine, but calls it an outdated format and charges the import fee plus a 20% surcharge for it.

NautiX

NautiX came out of an agreement between several portals at boot Düsseldorf 2020. According to Boat24, it and yachtall then set up a working group, founded Nautic Network, and after more than a year of development had a format meant to make the exchange of boat data error-free. Boat24’s dealer page now calls NautiX the industry-wide standard, supported by most portals and suppliers, and imports it free. Ask your CRM provider whether it can export NautiX before assuming you need OpenMarine.

Boats Group: YachtWorld, Boat Trader, boats.com

YachtWorld states that its listings come from subscribing member brokers and new-boat dealers. Members manage listings in BoatWizard, which Boats Group described in 2020 as home to its MLS and sold-boats database; the MLS was renamed the ProSeller Platform in August 2024. Boats Group also sells a Co-Brokerage API that shows co-brokerage boats on a broker’s own website, set up with an API key; the number of co-brokerage listings a broker can buy is capped at ten times its BoatWizard listing count, up to 10,000. We did not find a public description of how stock from a third-party CRM gets into BoatWizard, so ask your Boats Group account manager before you commit to a workflow.

IYBA MLS

In the US, YachtBroker.org runs an MLS for active professional and charter members of broker associations such as IYBA, YBAA, CYBA and NYBA. Its data feeds are REST JSON over IP-whitelisted HTTPS. They are designed for showing shared listings, broker and event information on members’ own websites and marketing, not for sending your stock to consumer portals.

Portal imports

Several portals will pull your stock from wherever it already is. Rightboat says its Accelerate and Illuminate memberships include a data feed for import or export. TheYachtMarket says it can import listings from other portals, naming YATCO, JamesEdition and Rightboat among them. This is the quickest route if you already list somewhere with good data, but you inherit that portal’s field mapping and its errors.

Fields that matter

Every format has dozens of optional fields. These are the ones that cause problems when they are missing or wrong:

Your stock reference. A unique ID per boat that never changes. If the ID changes, the portal creates a duplicate and orphans the old listing. Never reuse an ID for a different boat.
Status. Available, under offer, sold, withdrawn. Some formats have a status field; others rely on the boat dropping out of the file.
Price, currency and tax status. A number, an ISO currency code (EUR, USD, GBP, AUD), and whether VAT is paid or included. Rightboat says buyers treat placeholder prices such as £1 or “POA” as a reason to move on, and that more than half of buyers enter a price when they search.
Make, model, year. Spelled the way the portal’s model list spells it. “Fountaine Pajot” and “Fontaine Pajot” are two brands to a filter. For catamarans, model naming is a common trap: Bali 4.2 vs Bali 42, Leopard 46 vs Leopard 46 Powercat. Our catamaran specs database is a useful reference for names and dimensions.
Hull type. Make sure the boat is flagged as a catamaran, sail or power. Mapped wrongly, it vanishes from every multihull search.
LOA, beam, draught, in a stated unit.
Cabins, heads, berths. Separate numeric fields, not just text.
Engines. Count, make, power, hours. Check that your schema has room for a second engine’s hours rather than one combined figure.
Location. Country and marina or town.
Description, with language tags if the portal supports more than one language.
Contact. Which office or broker receives the enquiry.
Last updated. A timestamp lets the portal skip unchanged boats.

Photo handling

Photos cause more feed failures than text. Most feeds carry image URLs, not the images themselves, and the portal downloads them.

Stable, public URLs. No login, no expiring links, no redirects through a file-sharing service.
Order. Send images in the order you want them shown. The first one is the thumbnail in search results, so make it the best exterior shot.
Change the URL when you change the photo. Many portals cache by URL. Replace a file but keep the name, and the old image may stay up for weeks.
Size. Send full-resolution originals and let the portal resize. Rightboat recommends large, high-resolution portrait images for mobile.
Limits. Each portal caps the number of photos it takes per listing. Put the images that matter for a catamaran (both hulls, helm, engine rooms) early in the order so they survive the cut.

Keeping listings in sync when boats sell

A sold catamaran still showing on a portal annoys the buyer who enquires about it and wastes your time answering. Boat24 said slow removal of sold boats was one of the complaints about older feeds.

How to keep it clean:

Know how each portal reads removals. Some treat the feed as a full snapshot and delete anything not in it. Others need an explicit “sold” or “deleted” status. Get this in writing from each portal.
Use “under offer” if the format supports it. It keeps the listing up but tells buyers to expect a waiting list.
Check the import schedule. If a portal reads your feed once a day, a boat sold at 10:00 may be live until tomorrow. For a high-profile boat, remove it manually as well.
Audit monthly. Search each portal for your brokerage name and compare the count with your stock list. Duplicates and ghosts show up quickly this way.
Watch for orphans after a CRM change. Migrating systems often changes stock IDs. Ask each portal to purge your old listings before the new feed goes live.

Starting with a spreadsheet

Plenty of small brokerages and charter fleets do not have a CRM, and do not need one to start syndicating. A clean spreadsheet can be converted into most formats, and some platforms take one directly: yacht4web lists Excel and text files among its import options, and catamarket imports spreadsheets on request.

Set it up like this:

One row per boat, one column per field. No merged cells, no notes in random columns, no colour coding that carries meaning.
A header row with plain field names: stock_id, status, make, model, year, hull_type, loa_m, beam_m, cabins, heads, engine_count, engine_make, engine_hp, engine_hours_port, engine_hours_stbd, price, currency, vat_status, country, marina, description, photo_urls.
Numbers as numbers. 13.94, not “13.94 m” or “45ft 9in”. Put the unit in the column name.
Photo URLs in one column, separated by a character that never appears in a URL, such as a pipe (|), in display order.
Save as UTF-8 CSV so accents in French or German model names survive.

If you export to CSV, the closest thing to a rulebook is RFC 4180, an informational document from 2005. Its main points: a field that contains a comma, a line break or a double quote should be wrapped in double quotes, and a double quote inside such a field is escaped by doubling it. Descriptions break CSV files more than anything else, because they contain all three.

When the spreadsheet is stable, the next step is a published file at a fixed URL that your listing tool or a developer generates from it. At that point you have a feed.

Mistakes we see in broker feeds

Catamarans mapped to “sailboat” without a multihull flag.
A second engine’s hours squeezed into the description because the schema only had one field.
Prices sent without a currency, so a portal assumes its own.
Test listings left in the live feed.
Image URLs pointing at a staging server that later goes offline.
A feed switched off at the CRM end without telling the portals, leaving every listing frozen.

Importing stock to catamarket

catamarket, a marketplace for catamarans only, imports a broker’s stock from a feed or a spreadsheet on request. The dealer package costs €99 one-off for up to 25 listings, each online for 12 months, with no commission; brokers who join before 31 March 2027 get the first three months free, including the import. On request, a broker’s monohulls and motorboats can also be shown on our sister site boatmarket24.com. Details are on the broker page; current stock is in the marketplace, and more seller material is among our guides.

Related guides

Sources

Cover photo: Eric Ward on Unsplash.