Jeteffect Celebrating 25 Years in the Broker Business

Twenty-five years ago, Bryan Comstock and George Marburger founded Jeteffect, an aircraft brokerage and advisory firm specializing in the sale, acquisition, and consultation of business aircraft. Since then, the partners and their team have completed more than 900 transactions, from turboprops through ultra-long-range business jets.

Both Marburger and Comstock are pilots and brought their passion for aviation to growing their new company. Before launching Jeteffect, Comstock, who runs the company’s Long Beach, California, office, was a staff editor at Flying magazine and at AIN. Although he enjoyed some aspects of the writing life, especially meeting a lot of talented aviators, Comstock knew it wasn’t the right job for him, long-term. “I really want to do something else in aviation,” he said.

Living in Connecticut then, he decided to try selling light airplanes in the mid-1980s, but this proved challenging. “It was a learning process, especially in the winter trying to sell piston airplanes with snow all over the place. I loved what I was doing, but I wasn’t making any money.”

An opportunity arose for Comstock to move into larger airplane sales in Maryland, and he took it, quickly learning that selling jets was far more profitable than piston singles. “Within 90 days, I sold my first jet, an 800-hour Citation III. I went from struggling to pay my credit card bills to thinking about buying a house. This is a career,” he realized. “I can do what I love and make money at it.”

After moving to Long Beach and working for Toyota’s Airflite for seven years, Comstock and Marburger decided to launch their own company. “We had built enough credibility and relationships in the business,” Comstock recalled. But the timing was not the best. “We started in what looked like the worst time. The Nasdaq peaked a month or two after we started, and nine months later, 9/11 [happened].”

However, Jeteffect took off, in part because it was a bad market; there were more opportunities to get listings because so many people were selling their jets. And after 9/11, buyers came back to the market because they didn’t want to fly on airlines.

Since then, Jeteffect has prospered. “We’ve endured,” Comstock said, “all due to the hard work of the people here.” Many have been with the company for more than 20 years. Marburger, who holds multiple jet type ratings, eventually decided to move to Florida and open Jeteffect’s East Coast office.

Comstock encourages new entrants to the sales brokerage business, especially young college graduates who can start as sales engineers, doing research to support the brokers. “You have to know you’re not going to sell a jet every week, maybe not every month, or every year,” he said. He also gets calls from pilots who are out of work and want to switch careers. “It can work, depending on the person, but it’s really challenging. Age could be a barrier to some people, but if you have all the right tools, have been flying for a while, and have some sales acumen, it could work.” Because the brokerage business is commission only, he added, “you have to be confident in your ability.”

That said, selling aircraft is still dependent on having listings and spending time contacting potential sellers. What used to happen on the phone has transitioned to email and other internet methods. “The next 10 years will see some change,” Comstock said. “We won’t see aircraft brokers out of business. AI is very interesting, and that’s going to be one of the changes. We’re trying to better understand it, but because we’re so quiet about what we do, [we have to be careful]. If we drop names, we might lose a client.”

The AI challenge will involve educating AI models on the brokerage business. In a test, he asked an AI system which was the largest broker on the West Coast, and the answer did not match reality. “We have to educate each platform,” he said. “It’s a laborious and continuous thing. Normally, we’re very quiet; we don’t pound our chest. But with AI, you have to [do that] or get forgotten quickly. This has given me renewed energy.”

Meanwhile, the business aviation cycle has swung to a scarcity of young, low-time jets, with the Bombardier Challenger 650 and Gulfstream G650 extremely hard to find. Backlogs for new G700s are so far out that buyers are opting for G650s in the interim, Comstock explained. “It’s a very hot market on the most desirable airplanes. The challenge is getting good inventory. I don’t think we’re going to see buyers dry up.

“Aircraft brokerage is unregulated and therefore is fundamentally a trust business,” he said. “Our growth over the last 25 years has not come from chasing volume, but from protecting our clients’ interests, maintaining discretion, and standing behind every transaction we close—regardless of market conditions.”