For decades, the real estate industry has run on one simple piece of infrastructure: the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, the shared database that lets any broker see any listing, no matter which portal a buyer stumbles across first. Yachting never had an equivalent. Now Lionel Nicolai, a Frenchman who grew up around the boat business, is helping bring that infrastructure to the industry from EasyMLS’s headquarters in Miami.
Nicolai’s company, EasyMLS, is already being used by brokers across the United States, alongside an established base in Europe. The platform combines a growing suite of artificial intelligence tools with centralized inventory management and distribution, helping address the challenges of managing and sharing yacht listings across multiple channels.
“In real estate, no broker would work without an MLS,” Nicolai said. “Yachting never had a universal, independent MLS. That is what we are building, and it belongs to the brokers who use it.”
EasyMLS does not replace the software a broker already uses. Instead, it works alongside existing brokerage systems, allowing professionals to publish their inventory across more than ten portals from a single entry. At the same time, EasyMLS provides a private MLS environment that enables co-brokerage and collaboration between brokers, dealers, shipyards and charter operators, giving professionals greater control over how their inventory is shared and distributed.
Nicolai’s path to building it runs through two very different worlds. He grew up in a French family where selling boats was passed down from father to son, giving him an intimate, insider’s feel for the yachting business. Later, while living and working in the United States, he spent time in real estate and saw firsthand what a functioning MLS makes possible. Combine deep knowledge of boats with a front-row seat to how the American real estate market actually works, and you get the idea behind EasyMLS.
The platform is built for a wide swath of the professional yachting world, including brokers, dealers, shipyards and charter operators. These professionals can use EasyMLS to list and distribute their inventory, while the private MLS enables co-brokerage and collaboration between industry professionals. Private owners can also list and distribute their boats through the platform, but they do not access the professional co-brokerage network.
AI sits at the center of how it works. The AI Estimator generates an indicative market estimate in seconds, using real market comparables, so brokers get data-driven pricing instead of relying on guesswork or outdated comps. The AI Import Engine handles the unglamorous but time-consuming part of the job, automatically importing boat catalogs from PDFs, Excel files or third-party portal URLs, helping reduce the manual work involved in preparing and maintaining listings.
For an industry that has long operated across multiple platforms and channels, EasyMLS is bringing a more connected approach to yacht brokerage, combining centralized inventory management, distribution across more than ten portals and a private MLS for professional co-brokerage.
About EasyMLS
EasyMLS is a software platform for the yachting industry. It combines an inventory-driven CRM built around the boat, a private co-brokerage network, and distribution to the major marine portals from a single listing. The company serves yacht brokers, dealers, shipyards and charter operators, with its main markets in France and Italy and operations in Miami, Florida.
