Market Prices?

[rabernet]

I keep saying this over and over, but it doesn't seem to ever get absorbed into the bp market dogma. People just refuse to believe this.

The demand is greater than most breeders give credit for. I only post on this site, with the occasional post on fauna, and I have only put up two adds for snakes, ever, and both were in the classifieds on this site. That is the extent of my advertising and my name being out there in general. Last year was my first season breeding, I hatched 5 clutches and sold out of all of the hatchlings except for two normal males, and a male mojave. This year I only hatched one clutch so far, and I had three inquiries about the hatchlings by the second day my website was updated to show the clutch (withing three days of posting the hatching pics here), and have already sold two spiders, within a week of them hatching, and at least three weeks before they will even be ready to ship, and I put up zero ads for this clutch.

1. The demand is there. (Players in this hobby GREATLY underestimate the actual demand that exists for ball python morphs.)
2. If you breed balls, people will find you.
3. If you breed quality balls, people will buy them, even at the higher end of market prices.
4. If market prices stabilized, and market prices only dropped 10% per year for recessives and 20% per year for co-doms, every breeder would still sell out at those market prices every year. If might take more than 2 weeks to get rid of every last one of them*, but they would sell.

* This is the part that freaks people out. Too many people aren't willing to hold onto the babies they hatch for more than a month or two, so they all lower their prices as low as possible to make sure they sell every last snake as soon as possible, even if that means shooting themselves in the foot by practically giving the snakes they worked so hard to produce away for pennies on the dollar.

I could not agree more with this post. I had buyers for my clutches that I hatched so far, before I was even able to put them up on my site as available (my available page has yet to have an animal listed yet). Even the 4 normal males (two are possible het clowns) are already spoken for.

I posted hatch pictures, and I had inquiries almost immediately. Some of that has to do with name recognition here on the site, but I'd like to think that it's more that people appreciate animals produced with quality in mind - selective breeding, rather than throwing my morphs at normal girls who aren't going to compliment the morph.

I hope to have some lemon pastels next season, I've got a waiting list for them. And my animals will NOT be sold at rock bottom prices. I know that they are nicer than your "average" pastel, and if I have to hang onto them, I'm perfectly happy to do so. I'd like to hold back a male next year anyway - who knows, something unfathomable could happen to Winston, and then I'd be without a back-up male. I hope that never happens, but the yearlings that I produced last year still take my breath away.

When I'm in the market to add to my collection, I only want to add the FINEST example of a morph to my collection, and I am willing to pay more than market price to get that animal, if that's what the seller is asking. There's no way I'm going to tell them "well, Jimbob is selling them for XXX". Well, if I liked Jimbob's animals, I'd be buying his animals, not coming to someone who has nicer animals and try to talk them down to Jimbob's prices.

I'd like to believe that there are others out there, like myself who also appreciate quality and recognize that a stellar animal should be worth more than an average example.