Quote Originally Posted by Dragonviper View Post
I wrote crashing in quotes because I do think there are people looking for nice animals and are willing to pay a bit more for the quality/look they are going for and that the appeal of a healthy pretty snake would trump that of a cheap one. It is frustrating knowing that I spent alot of money building up a nice collection of healthy, gorgeous animals to have someone tell me they are practically worthless. I just wanted to get a different perspective from all of you, the more opinions the better...FB reptiles groups have been irking me and I thought I would get this market question off of my chest..there is so much crazy price slashing that I do wonder about being able to sustain my hobby with the money I get from future clutches.
Yea, I can't say I'm fond of it either. I normally try to stick with my local breeders anyways as I have fantastic ones here.

Sean Bradley(Exotics By Nature)
Tim Bailey(Bailey & Bailey Reptiles)
Luke Martin(Bronze Serpent Reptiles)

I quite often visit Sean and Tim at their house so I've seen their facilities and all that, plus I know they have clean animals on top of that. I haven't been to Luke's but I'm sure I could if I asked, but I don't want to deal with the traffic to get to his place lol. Sean & Tim are like 20 minutes from me.

I have a few other snakes that I've gotten from members on the forum, but aside from that I stick with local, mainly because I can see the snake in person and it's much easier to pinpoint what I like by looking in person rather than from a picture. Then another reason is because I don't have to fork out shipping money.

I recently got a Lesser Pastel from a guy from FL at the Repticon in Baton Rouge and when I got home I found it infested with mites upon closer inspection. That's one reason I like to deal local, as I know the conditions of my local guys and I'd vouch for them in a heartbeat.

As far as the auctions go though, I did get a Mahogany male from Ben Siegel when I won the auction at $312, though I had a friend watching it to make sure nobody out bid me because I was sleeping for the final few hours of the auction. He kept saying this is a $750 retail snake, which honestly rather annoyed me and I was going to post in what market are you referring to, but I chose to keep my mouth shut. That male is probably about what he paid for it maybe a bit more, because I know who he got that snake from. He said in that auction that he could add a female for $800. I again held my tongue, because what I wanted to say is that while he got those snakes from Amir, in no way did he pay close to $800. So he's inflating some serious price when he buys/trades then sells.