Posted by:
Rtdunham
at Wed Sep 7 20:59:28 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Rtdunham ]
>>I was wondering if snow hondurans have any value now? What is the going price that these animals are really selling for?
I'm sold out of this year's males but was high female so have a few of them left. Snows are still the highest priced of the frequently available honduran morphs (i.e., they're still more costly and in more demand than ghosts; a hybino comparison isn't apples-to-apples because though i've got an order for hybinos at about twice what a snow costs, only one baby's been produced (not by me, by a customer) and the clutch i have that COULD produce hybinos should, statistically, produce only one.) So anyway, exclude hybinos and the snows are still the most costly.
I agree with tom, by the way, that the adults are far more distinctive than juveniles (see photo--and it doesn't have nearly as bright yellow as some of my others...they're really very distinctive from all other hondo morphs).
but here's a pricing observation: with almost every morph, sooner or later someone gets big ideas and holds back stock to produce beaucoup specimens of a particular type, lured perhaps by the price of a single animal. Sometimes those breeders don't already have a wide network of customers, or haven't been in the biz long enough to have established a reputation to assure buyers, no matter how honest they might be, so it's hard for them to quickly* get their desired price. they panic--or, in fairness, sometimes they urgently need money for a family emergency--so they drop the price, not recognizing that there may be other issues besides the price that are slowing sales. I know one nice fella who asked me, "what's happened to the honduran market?" -- one week after his babies hatched. What could i say? I know one fella produced more snows this year than i have in any year among the many in which snows have been one of my favorite projects. So yes, he faces unusual selling challenges: a guy or gal who produces one or two has one or two to sell and will sell them at a reasonable price over a couple months; a person with ten from a season needs to expect to either take longer or reduce prices. Most people will make the sensible choice of protecting their investment by taking some time: I'm used to my last hondo babies of all types selling sometime during the first quarter of the next year, and when they have all sold by the end of the year in which they hatched i'm thrilled. Not everyone who will eventually buy an animal is sitting waiting to buy them in the second week of september. People's needs change, their finances change, all sorts of things change. Prices will fluctuate, the quality of the animals and service and guarantees will fluctuate. And as has been observed in this thread, the best measure of what they're selling for is in the classifieds.
another pricing observation: prices always go down. that should be expected. the only exception i can remember was when albino hondos appeared and people realized they could be used with anerythristics to create (after a generation or two of work) "snow" hondurans. the anery price, which had been at 900-1,000 ea for years but had recently dropped to maybe 600, bumped back up to around 800, because everyone wanted them to use with their newly acquired albinos, or the albinos they hoped to acquire in the next couple years. It's all about supply and demand.
terry
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odd sort of question - Rtdunham, Wed Sep 7 20:59:28 2005 
