Quote Originally Posted by Neal View Post
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.

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.
I see this a lot at the local shows the one company goes around at the end of the show (near end) and buys up a lot of the animals for less than half price and have the same snakes later on at a high price. (I wont deal with the company at these shows due to his practice.
But I do believe the market will level out at some point, we may never see the high prices we originally purchased the animals for again (once we breed them.)
but I hope that the market still hold enough value to keep the snakes to be consider more than a trend animal in the future..