Where did all the houseboats go?

It's strange. When I started looking at houseboats about a month ago (first part of July?) there were a lot of them on the market, and I was amazed at how good some of the deals looked. Granted, I was basing that only on the ads and experience has shown me that a lot of the deals aren't really as nice in person, but there were a lot of boats listed in under 30K range.

Now, I did a Craigslist search and there were only 16 boats listed total?!?!? Throwing out the $100K boats and the steel hulls, there wasn't really much to look at at all. Why? Did everyone sell the boats all of a sudden? Maybe they decided that this late in the summer it wasn't worth it?

It seems to me that if I was selling a boat I would be getting eager about now. Soon you have to pay out the money to winterize. Depending on location, maybe pay for a haul-out and wrap. In many locations, if you don't sell soon, you're stuck with another year of slip rental. It seems to me it would be better to drop you price a couple grand and save the hassle and expense if you could sell now.

Oh well, I'm still broke so it's all academic.

Even though we're still broke, we did stop and look at a boat this weekend. Bass Pro Shops sell the Sun Tracker line of boats which includes a small 32 foot boat.

The cabin part is TINY and actually a bigger issue is it has no generator. That said, at 32 feet it's almost as large as our Kingscraft but much more outside room and less inside and storage space. In it's favor is the fact that it's more recent than many boats we've looked at, aluminum means low maintenance, and pontoons means that worst case you replace a tube. All aluminum floor and most of the superstructure seems to be aluminum. The pontoons along with LOTS of deck space on front and rear means it would actually be more usable as a fishing platform also.

Kay couldn't get in to look, but she said she thought oit might be suitable as a temporary boat until something bigger/better came along. On one hand I hate spending that much money while looking for something bigger and better (they have GREAT resale so we'd be looking at $10k to $30K to buy one today), but on the other, I see some attraction to a smaller boat, especially at current gas prices, and a trailer-able boat would make it easier to look for a marina/lake we like. After the Kingscraft, I suspect it would feel rather cramped though.