Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Very confused about grey market Yamahas

I am in the market for Yamaha U1 or U3 used piano. I visited a very reputable dealer of refurbished pianos, and after doing some research, find that most of his pianos are imported from Japan. These were pianos that were manufactured for Japan market and range from 30-40 years old. The one we found seemed to play well, but I have no idea what risks are associated with purchasing this type of "grey market" piano. My gut is telling me to focus my search on either a second hand U1 or U3 that was manufactured for the US market, or just take the plunge and purchase it new. We can afford a new piano, but obviously I would prefer to spend half the amount for a decent used piano (I don't play...it is for my piano student children...one of which is getting to the advanced stage).

My question would be are there any stories out there of people having problems down the line with these grey market pianos. I hear a lot of people boasting about how great their grey market pianos are shortly after purchase...or even a few years after purchase. I want to know how these pianos are 10 years or more after purchase...because the dealer I am working with provides a 10 year warranty. So I am assuming the problems that arise (sound board, tuning pins) don't turn up until many years after being exposed to the drier climate.

Thanks in advance...I appreciate any help or insight you can provide!

Hi Ebony628, and welcome to Piano World!

You ask some great questions, and the debate about grey-market pianos and seasoned for destination is one of greatest debates of all time regarding pianos (or it seems to me to be that way).

You'll likely get some advice from the pros, but my advice doesn't cost you any more!

It's a gamble to an extent, but the grey-market pianos do usually sell for a bit less than the market price for the same piano made for the USA market (or at least that is the biggest advantage I can think of).

Also, it sounds like you already have a bit of a bias toward the grey-market status of your prospect, regardless of the 10 year dealer warranty.

So, my advice to you... either find a comparable U1 or U3 model made for the US market or buy new.

Buyers remorse is not unusual when you spend a lot of money, but it is best to try and avoid it in advance, if possible!

Good luck, and keep us informed!

Rick

Many grey market pianos are good pianos.

The problem arises from pianos that have experienced extended high humidity, like that found in some parts of Japan, and then experience extreme dry conditions like those found in North America. But not all parts of Japan are humid. Also, the piano may have been in a humidity controlled enviroment.

Have a technician inspect it and look for pressure ridges on the soundboard and loose tuning pins, signs of imminent damage due to excessive shrinkage due to dryness.

But, have you considered getting a grand? Any advanced player will soon discover the limitations of the upright.

Seriously buy a grand if you can afford it. If you're agonizing over a Carter-era upright, I would advise you to move on to better instruments. I don't think you'll regret it, and be sure to make your kids part of the selection experience in that you want an instrument they feel both comfortable and challenged by. Have you gotten input from their teacher?

Also, for terminology's sake doesn't Grey Market mean a NEW Yamaha that's been manufactured for the Asian market, but has been imported and resold by an unauthorized reseller?

Very well put.

No, they are used pianos - generally between 25 and 10 years old, but sometimes older or newer. They are sold significantly cheaper than a comparable authorised model of the same age. Condition varies, some good, some bad, some "refurbished" - you'd want an independent technician to check it out if you didn't know pianos. I got one as a makeshift solution (from a private buyer who had bought it grey market). It's been pretty good. I've done some work on it to bring it up to scratch, but nothing wrong with it.

With all due respect, and I'm sure you've made some helpful posts, the combination of elitism and ignorance you've presented here would be tough to beat.

For most parents, it's not a question of what they can afford, but of ordering the many costly priorities that come with raising kids and tending to them as best they can.

Ebony,

As Mark wrote, many grey market pianos are good ones. Occasionally you even find different U models among them of a higher initial quality than the ones Yamaha chose to sell here. But as the last 10-15 years have rolled by, the grey market has stalled in the 70's and 80's. There are many reasons for that. Even in the best of times, Japan did not have an infinite supply of pianos that grey marketeers could source cheaply, and after the economic bubble burst there in 1990, new piano sales dipped, and people began to rethink the cultural bias against buying used goods. The grey marketeer's job got harder.

In my opinion, any Yamaha U series earleir than the mid-80's, grey market or not, is an unnecessary risk unless it's quite cheap, which will not be the case when sold by vendors who specialize in grey market pianos. If you live in a market where you can find U series pianos from the 90's or 2000's from a private seller, your risks would be far less. It's not a matter of grey market origin, it's about general wear and tear.

Mark hit the nail squarely on the head with his comments about wood succumbing to undue stress. In addition to humid conditions in parts of Japan, it's also a fact that some grey marketeers are now expanding their search to more tropical Asian countries, so some current grey market pianos arrive in North America these days not exactly from Japan, but from other countries by way of Japan. For that reason, if you get a grey market Yamaha, you're less at risk with one that has been here a while and stabilized than something fresh off a boat.

I know there are exceptions to the rule. I've seen lovely U series pianos from circa 1980 that are doing fine for their owners, and many of them are grey market. I'm just writing about general levels of risk.

Seriously.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a grey-market Yamaha especially if it has a good warranty from a dealer that should survive most of it. However, if I were to buy one I would probably pay about half or two-thirds of a comparable non-grey market piano. It very well could be just as good as a 'built-for-the-US' Yamaha, but when you try to sell it it'll have the same grey-market cloud hanging over it. As long as you price it accordingly someone will buy it - but you should also price it accordingly.

Can you identify a gray market piano by the serial number? Or do you know based on the model?

Yes... check here. Yamaha Serial # page

Rick

I don't think there's anything wrong with grey market pianos except that they're outrageously expensive for their age.

Kurt

Thanks everyone for your input. It was very helpful and reinforced some of my suspicions about this market. I was particularly impressed with turandot's observation of how the grey market has dried up...that explains why there are no pianos available beyond early to mid 80's.

Today I shopped around for a new U1, and it turns out that for an additional $2,000 I can have a brand new U1 delivered and tuned. This is only 25% more than what the reputable grey market dealer wants to charge me for something that is over 40 years old and no knowledge of its history or origin. Not sure people realize this because this particular distributor advertises that a new U1 is over $10K for comparison purposes. If you take his word for it, then you think you are getting a bargain. Not sure why nobody has called out this blatant inaccuracy on his website...it is totally misleading!!

Man, if that's true I take it as a tremendous compliment. There are some real snobs on this forum and winning out over them sounds like a heck of an accomplishment.

But in all seriousness, this is why I said "if you can afford it," because the the OP indicated they COULD afford to buy new, but wanted to economize, which is perfectly reasonable. It's also why I asked for confirmation on a definition I clearly was confused by, rather than stating it as fact. I thought Grey Market meant something else.

Welcome to PianoWorld.

There are at least 3 versions of the YAMAHA U1 sold new.

The best is the YUS1, which in Australia has Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of $14,000. It is made in Japan.

There is the U1PE - again made in Japan, RRP $10,000.

There is the Indonesian U1J PE - RRP $7,000.

When I assisted my Mum to buy a piano 2 yrs ago, we bought the YUS1. The U1J was very inferior, and not up to the playing enjoyment of some Chinese pianos which were of similar price.

With Grey Market - I've helped people in the past to buy second-hand pianos. Here, the vast majority of U1/U3s were Grey Market - in many cases by technicians. They varied considerably, and I suspect varied according to how much effort the importing dealer/technician put into them. There were some which played VERY nicely, others I would walk away from immediately.

With non-Grey Market pianos, there were the occasional home piano I ran into, and they were generally quite good. However, I did encounter quite a few which seemed to have had a hard life as institutional pianos.

I'd consider it important to have any prospective used piano checked out by your own technician.

If buying new, I'd also check out some other brands, as you (assuming you're in USA) have a large variety of makes and models available. KAWAI comes to mind as the most direct competitor to YAMAHA, and I've played some very nice K series KAWAIs in recent years.

Whatever you do, don't rush. Play plenty of pianos, that way you'll be sure what you really want and like.

Welcome to the confusing world of buying pianos. The U1 probably does MSRP for about $10K, but nobody sells it for that. But of course if you're selling grey-market U1's you'd love people to believe that.

There are countless threads about how confusing, bordering deception, the pricing practices are with pianos. Basically, a lot of the brands publish completely meaningless MSRP's that's often 50-100% higher than the typical selling price. Then dealers put MSRP on the piano, and then you have to get a quote, read a text book on buying a piano: PianoBuyer, haggle, run between dealers, read through 100's of threads on PW, to figure out if you're getting a fair deal.

Anyways, if you're in California, where pianos seem to sell on the low side, U1's sell for $6K but they're higher in most other states for some reason.

"Grey Market" just means something's been imported through a channel other than the "official" one. It doesn't necessarily mean the product is inferior. It usually indicates that there's a large enough differential in two marketplaces that someone outside the "official" supply chain can acquire something in one market inexpensively enough to make it available for sale in another marketplace at a price below the "official" product's price. They can turn a profit and the buyer saves money. Only the "official" importers are unhappy, which is why they tend to cast aspersion on the grey market. The products can be new, or used, and may or may not have a warranty provided by the importer.

In general, I think the presence of grey market products is good for the consumer, because the increase in supply drives prices down. Consumers have a viable alternative which costs less. Again, naturally, the "official" importer does not benefit from this dynamic.

In the piano world, the most significant grey market is for second-hand Yamahas and Kawais. My understanding is that cultural bias against buying things second-hand in Japan drove the value of used pianos there drastically down. Entrepreneurs could buy them on the cheap and ship containers full of them to other markets where that bias did not exist.

As Turandot indicated, sometimes the dynamics that allow the grey market to exist change. The cultural bias changes, or the surplus is consumed, etc.

Anyway, "grey market" in and of itself isn't bad. You shouldn't reject a piano simply because it's "grey market;" neither should you buy one simply because it's "grey market." You should treat it like any other second hand piano: assess it's condition. As Michaelha indicated, you might expect a price discrepancy between two pianos that are essentially the same if one is grey market, and the other is not, simply because of the perception, but if a grey market piano speaks to you, is in good condition, and you like the price, then you should feel comfortable buying it. Conversely, if it's not in good condition, or is overpriced, etc, then don't buy it.

+1

A few thousand dollars can pay for a lot of lessons, or a semester of college, etc.

Edony,

I sense that you're no longer confused.

It seems that your local market offers a convergence of purveyors of high-priced grey market ancient warriors Golden Oldies and Yamaha retailers willing to cut off their noses on a new U-1 price to keep a sale away from competitors. I don't know where you are, but we have such a convergence in a couple of California markets.

On the price deception, it's not standard practice, but it's common enough. You might enjoy looking through this collection of grey market Yamahas beginning with #14. You'll see 40-year-old U-1's and U-3's along with upgraded specialty models never sold by Yamaha in the US. The list price of a new one today is listed along with the seller's price for his oldie. My guess would be that these oldies from this dealer are at least satisfactory, and many of them downright delightful. However, in the current scheme of things, they are very expensive.

http://www.rickjonespianos.com/uprights.htm

I am quite surprised that the discussion, i.e. "appeal" of grey market pianos seems to linger on.

As dealers we have full access to them but have early on decided against them.

Considering the quality and price of some of the best new Chinese pianos on market today, it just doesn't make any sense anymore.

With the possible exceptions of some exceptional 50-52" uprights, the new market has changes so dramatically that in only short time people will scratch their head about the decision they made buying grey markets today.

Prepared to admit that there may be exceptions but not as long as most dealers keep buying B-C- stock qualities. [the internal ratings of 'what' pianos to select from suppliers' endless lists..]

Let time decide if this was right.

Chances are greys will be the next wave of pianos going to the dump.
Nothing lasts forever.

Norbert

I might be able to help with this one. Until very recently, I had a refurbished 1975 U1, that may well have been the kind of Grey market piano you're talking about (although I don't know it's history for sure). I had it for almost 11 years, and was very happy with it. Indeed, theonly reason I don't still have it is I was fortunate enough to be able to upgrade to a brand new YUS5. Even after that time, it still sounded nice, and there were no issues with tuning stability.

Had I been keeping it, there were certainly some jobs that I would have got done, but some of those were the more advanced parts of regular maintenance, that would be needed every few years even on a piano bought new.

The only thing I (as a non expert) would have wanted to replace parts wise were the bass strings, and that's a not inconsiderable expensethat i would have considered worthwhile if I was keeping that piano. Looking at the choice I made on that piano 11 years ago,I'm absolutely confident it was the right one given the circumstances of the time.

That said, in the piano market of today, I'm much less convinced that a grey market Yamaha is the choiceI'd make now. Norbert is right that the Chinese makers have come a long way in recent years,and that would be a credible option now in a way that it didn't seem to be (to me at least) 10 or 15 years ago.

Yamaha's own budget models are also an interesting alternative now. There's a Yamaha dealer who posts on here(and who I actually bought my YUS5 from) who's posted the view that a new Yamaha B3 has much more in common with a new U1 than a U1 from 30-40 years ago does. With the price difference(here in the UK at least) between a grey market U1 and a new B3 not being huge, perhaps the latter might be a better choice ?

Finally, there's the simple mechanics of age.While I'm not convinced personally by the whole "seasoned for destination " argument (I hasten to add that this is a non expert view,I 'mjust sceptical about how that works in a context of widelydiffering conditions within an individual national market, especially one as vast as the U.S.A) All other things being equal, a 30 year old piano will last 30 years less than a new one of similar quality, just by virtue od being 30 years older. It's not quite that simple in practice of course, as there are so many variables at play.

But that doesn't change the fact that in terms of the simple question as to whether a grey market piano will give 10-20 years of service, my own experience suggests it probably would. And it might well be that going down that route is the best option for you. It certainly was for me when I did it. It's just that given the options now, I'd want to look at al the other options first before committing to that particular route.