We live in South Dakota, bought our current boat in Somerset, Mass, just up the bay from Newport, RI. The boat before that was for sale in Texas. Good deals both times, worked out very well both times but maybe we got lucky. We tried Minneapolis, pretty big boat market (not Florida-big of course, but pretty good) but after months of looking nothing happened to work out. We also did find two in Florida worth checking out. My father lives there so he looked at one of them for us, and I checked out the other one myself on a little side trip from a work conference. I remember the one in Titusville, FL had sea birds nesting in the flybridge, contrary to the sales pictures. It was almost funny. but I did waste some hours on the road.
I know you don't want to waste money buying plane tickets to look at dogs, but that's really a very minor part of boat expenses. And if you are flying to a big boat area, it helps to line up two or three possibilities, make the trip more efficient or worthwhile. On our current boat for example we treated the trip to Newport as a weekend mini-vacation. If the boat worked out, great, if not, we got to see the fall colors in New England. Those plane tickets and a night in the America's Cup Inn in Newport were about .000001% of the cost of shipping and owning our boat. And no matter how much you trust somebody else's look-around, you'll want and need to look at it yourself at some point anyway, if it could be THE ONE.