When to buy a Banana

[reptileexperts]

I didn't get all 4 pages in, but I will say this:

Get in when the price point approaches one where you will be able to sell the snakes. I forget who wrote it up, I think Ben Renick, but he talks about strategies for breeding snakes. You could buy, breed, and sell lower priced snakes all day and make a good practice out of it. For me, with the presence I have and the experience and references and reputation I have, if I tried to sell a $1000+ snake I would have it sit in my rack till it was a $500 snake. I think this is a lot of the reason the price on banana dropped so fast. More people in the market thinking they can make a quick investment out of the gates and become rich because they see high priced snakes. They go out and buy a banana for 10k, breed it to 10 normal females, and when they have 15 bananas and can't sell them for 5k a pop they panic and try to recoup their costs - sell them at 1500 a pop and they have a hard time finding people to trust them even with that.

Buy new breeders in anticipation of the pricepoint of animal you will be comfortably able to sell by the time you breed it.

This also points out something else - people are buying males and stamping them to 10-15 normal girls or however many girls he'll breed. Then producing a decent number of Banana's in their first 2 years of the investment. When this happens we overcrowd the market causing prices to drop due to a demand drop. Prices then continue to drop for fast sell, competitive pricing, etc. . . it's a vicious cycle. At today's price points, even with one clutch, I imagine that a Banana investment will still realistically make its money back in one clutch if you use the right female (Bee female perhaps? that's pretty basic but will do great things if the odds are in your favor).

Sorry - but just wanted to point out that while yes it may be because reputation is not good - I've bought from people that I've only seen one review of, and spent some fairly good money and got great snakes. People will buy at high end pricing if the snake is right as long as the breeder can show they are on the right. But again, the bigger take home is people buy a male, and mass produce the single genes with their normal girls, and then demand goes down as market quantity goes up.