The time required to sell a pre-owned private jet in the first half of 2025 was, on average, 220 days, up from 184 days during the same period in 2024, per JETNET's mid-year market data. That nearly 20-percent extension in deliberation time tells you more about aircraft buyers today than any price chart.
Aircraft buyers in this market have brought a specific kind of deliberation to the process: sharper questions about mission fit, five-year depreciation trajectories, and true all-in ownership costs, research they are increasingly conducting before a broker call enters the picture. The shift toward self-directed research before broker engagement is changing how high-value aircraft transactions begin and exposing a gap between what buyers now expect and what traditional brokerage workflows were built to deliver.
That gap has a history. In charter, it opened around 2012. It took an AI-powered mobile marketplace to close it.
When Sergey Petrossov, the University of Florida and Stanford-educated entrepreneur, developed JetSmarter in 2012, private jet booking operated largely on phone calls, manual coordination, and multi-day response windows. The AI-driven marketplace he launched in 2013 compressed that friction into a mobile transaction. The platform became the world's largest on-demand private jet marketplace before Vista Global's 2019 acquisition. Petrossov then served at Vista as President of XO and Chief Growth & Digital Officer. That role extended the same AI-based logic at a global scale across the combined XO and JetSmarter network.
The ownership market never went through that same compression. Aircraft valued at $10 million and above (Challengers, Globals, Gulfstreams) still change hands through processes that look much as they did two decades ago: broker calls, opaque valuations, weeks-long data assembly, and near-total reliance on proprietary relationship networks. JETNET's mid-year data showed approximately 82 percent of listed transactions in H1 2025 involved a broker or dealer as an intermediary. That number hasn't moved.
What has changed is what buyers expect when they arrive at a broker's desk.
Corporate Jet Investor described the Aero Ventures platform as designed to let clients “window shop” and experiment with different ownership scenarios before engaging an advisor, modeled on the same consumer interaction dynamics that made Zillow and Carfax standard tools in real estate and automotive markets. Petrossov elaborated on the buyer psychology behind that design: “Clients don't necessarily want to call their broker every time they're curious about a Challenger 350 or want to run the numbers on different ownership models. But when they can explore on their own and simulate real scenarios, it sparks ideas and builds familiarity.”
That buyer behavior, research first and advisor second, is the market condition Aero Ventures was designed around.
Aero Ventures Marketplace launched September 3, 2025. The venture combines Petrossov with Bill Papariella, who built Jet Edge from four aircraft to more than 100 aircraft and $600 million in revenue before Vista Global's acquisition in 2022. The team has collectively completed more than $5 billion in aircraft transactions.
The platform is an AI-powered information layer built to make brokers more effective at the moment buyers arrive ready to engage, not to replace them.
The core tool is an AI-based valuation engine that aggregates transaction data, aircraft specifications, maintenance records, comparable sales, and macroeconomic indicators to produce instant fair market values. Where a traditional broker might spend two to three days assembling a comparable market analysis, the AI-powered system generates one in seconds. The platform also runs five-year ownership cost simulations, absorption rate analytics that tell buyers whether conditions favor acquisition or disposition for a specific aircraft type, and residual value forecasts built on machine learning-based depreciation modeling.
The analogy Petrossov and Papariella use consistently: Zillow, Edmunds, Carfax, and Carvana combined. Those platforms didn't displace real estate agents or car dealers. They changed the information asymmetry that defined those industries, and in doing so changed the nature of how advisors justify their fees.
The pre-owned aircraft market is large enough to carry the thesis. Global Jet Capital estimates at least $17.5 billion in annual pre-owned private jet sales over the next three years. That volume flows through a brokerage community that has structured its workflows around being the primary source of market intelligence, a position that holds when buyers have no practical alternative.
That position is softening. Buyers who can run an AI-powered ownership cost simulation before the first conversation, and who arrive with specific questions about a particular aircraft's five-year depreciation trajectory, want brokers to help them execute, not explain the basics. The data-assembly function is increasingly automated. The judgment function remains human: advising on transaction timing, structuring complex deals, navigating counterparty dynamics, accessing off-market inventory.
The existing structure of the market also has a transparency problem that AI-driven tools can address. Many aircraft aren't publicly listed, and some broker listings function as lead-generation tools rather than actual available inventory. That creates confusion for buyers trying to assess market depth and pricing accuracy without direct industry access.
Aero Ventures' AI platform uses a curated matching model: buyers and sellers are vetted before engagement, with access to listed and off-market aircraft, verified transaction histories, and AI-based scenario modeling. The intent is to give buyers the information baseline they previously got only from sustained broker relationships, but before that relationship begins rather than as a condition of it.
The financing integration separates Aero Ventures from a pure data play. Traditional aviation brokerage separates transaction and financing into sequential, often disconnected processes: buyers find an aircraft, agree on terms, and then begin the financing application, a sequence that can introduce weeks of delay and occasionally unwinds deals entirely. In a market where average days on market have already stretched to 220 days, that additional wait compounds the cost of hesitation for both sides.
Aero Ventures' AI-based lending workflow produces quotes within 24 to 48 hours, compared to the typical weeks required by traditional aviation lenders. For sellers who need certainty over price optimization, the platform offers capital-backed liquidity that can deliver cash offers within 48 hours of engagement. The firm's $5 billion transaction history gives it access to capital structures that smaller boutique brokerages cannot replicate.
Buyers who secure financing approval before finalizing negotiation terms operate from a stronger position and reach closing faster. Deals that stall at the capital stage are common in this market; removing that variable changes the negotiating dynamic.
Petrossov's three ventures in private aviation, JetSmarter, XO at Vista, and now Aero Ventures, follow a specific analytical pattern. Identify a segment of the market where transaction friction outpaces what AI-driven tools can solve. Build an AI-powered marketplace around that specific friction. Calibrate the technology to augment, not displace, the human expertise that remains genuinely irreplaceable.
“On the ownership and sales side, I see the same gaps we once saw in charter: fragmentation, inefficiency, and an information deficit,” Petrossov told Sherpa Report. “AeroVentures was built to solve those, bringing speed, data, advisory, and capital into one ecosystem.”
The platform targets transactions above $10 million, with access granted through selective vetting. Approved clients receive the full suite of AI-based tools: instant valuations, market analytics, absorption rate data, and scenario modeling, plus brokerage services and off-market listings. The curated model reflects a deliberate choice. This is an AI-driven system designed for buyers who can act on detailed market data, not a general-inventory listing platform built for volume.
That specificity of focus distinguishes the Aero Ventures approach from earlier aviation technology plays. JetSmarter pursued scale through accessibility and membership. The Aero Ventures AI platform targets an audience defined by transaction complexity, buyers and sellers for whom the difference between a well-timed $12 million acquisition and a mispriced one carries real financial consequences.
The private aviation brokerage community has operated for decades on the premise that relationships are the business. Access to the right aircraft, the right counterparty, the right pricing intelligence at the right moment: that is what has historically justified a broker's margin.
None of that disappears. What shifts is which parts of that relationship brokers most need to protect. Advisors who integrate AI-based tools into their practice will spend less time assembling data that buyers are increasingly producing themselves, and more time on the judgment calls that data cannot replace. Advisors who don't will find clients arriving better-informed and less willing to pay for information they already have.
Petrossov's line on the underlying thesis is clear. “We are not trying to replace the human side of aviation,” he told Sherpa Report. “We are elevating it.”
Whether that proposition holds for the full range of brokerage functions, or whether AI-driven data transparency eventually displaces some intermediary roles, remains genuinely unsettled. Aircraft buyers are spending more time researching before they engage. The brokers who adapt their workflows to meet buyers at that earlier stage, with better tools rather than just better networks, are the ones best positioned for the market taking shape.
