Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Last year a male would run $15K-$18K.
Now I've seen them as low as $8K, but more around $10K.
Any idea why?
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Greg Holland
G&M HERPS
www.imageevent.com/gmherps
gmherps@sbcglobal.net

they'll come down as time goes on

......seen them for $7000 female.......seen males at usually around $10000 or 12000........

heard of bragging of a pair bought at $8000.....(yes for the 2)

and heard of one sold at origionally....$3500.......

they breed fast.....they are everywhere......see more of them than pieds and pastels and albinos out there....

good luck

you'll make money either way.....
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.....wow....you people....really.....you are exactly like I thought.........

............right?

......................................................

I've watched the reptile market for years and it's the same thing, year after year. There are several things that go on that hurt the market.

People that aren't into a certain project will bad mouth a morph and that will damage the selling capabilities of the morph.

Then you have the people that bragging about how many they have hatched and putting pictures out on every forum. That makes people that have no faith in their animals selling to panic and they start selling their animals way below market value.

Once the cheap animals are sold off, other people that place a higher value on their animals will then begin to sell their animals at a price they consider fair.

Then you have the het vs. co-dom people. Some people will say that co-doms crash because they are all over the place. Well, out of all the vendors at Daytona, I didn't see Spiders on every table. But Pieds and Pastels were everywhere.

With recessive traits you have hets and poss. hets all over the market. With co-dom you have the visible morph and that is it. It takes years for the visible morph to catch up with the amount of recessive hets. in the market.

People should stop bad mouthing animals that they aren't working with and respect everyone's right to sell their animals at fair market value.

I think the Spider Market is great! Even if you paid $15,000 for a male last year you can still make an insane return! Hands down the best place to put your money is in Ball Pythons. Don't think that Spider prices will continue to drop so fast. As these animals become more affordable the demand will increase and this in turn will hold prices steady. Pastels are a perfect example...

Why did Spider prices drop so fast? Here's my theory...

1- NERD had a really large breeding group when they started releasing the Spider into the market. So they released many animals during the past two years. Very smart or just a result of increased demand with introduction of some cool Spider crosses. Either way... $$$

2- Spiders are prolific breeders. Many people have had 7 month old males breeding multiple females. Big numbers...

3- The biggest reason... that good old Summer-time impatience! LOL, Summer time is the slowest time of year for snake sales. Many people have Spiders and some are willing to sell them below market to get cash fast.

So basically there are a lot of Spiders out there now and that's why the price adjusted. But I think the Spider is still and will be highly sought after animal for a long time to come.

Oz
OzzyBoids

Not that I'm an expert so it doesn't mater but I agree on your points.

The only think I have to add is that I think perhaps last year there was a lot of peer pressure for breeders to hold an artificially high price given the large supply. That pressure is still there this year but the number of breeders finally became too great for it to keep them under control. If the price fixing hadn't been taking place for so long the drops would have been more steady each year rather than the big one between last and this year. As pointed out last year's investors should still come out fine but this is an example of why fake prices (i.e. not determined just by supply and demand) aren't good.

There is nothing wrong with holding back babies that are worth more to you than the going market price (an example of the original breeder’s demand for them) but to keep animals you would gladly sell at a lower price (at which they would actually be demanded) just because you are afraid of the scorn from other breeders should you advertise that lower price is helping to maintain an artificial fixed price. It’s a loose loose situation. You don’t get to sell snakes, very few people who want snakes get to buy them, and the ones that do are discouraged when they suddenly take a big drop to the actual free market supply and demand price.

I don't believe there is any peer pressure put on people to sell animals at artificially high prices. There are rules in business, any type of business, that should be adhered too, but no one is forced into selling animals for more than they are worth.

Spiders are not coming out of Africa, and there are not Spiders growing on trees. There are a few ads each day for Spiders, just as there are every other morph out there, including Lessers and Mojaves.

None of these morphs are in such great abundance that everyone that wants one can afford to own one. Several years ago when Spiders went on the market, they started out at I believe $22K, then went up to $25K, then they went down again into the lower twenties.

About 2 years ago a friend of mine got into the Spider market and last year produced several Spiders and sold what he chose to sell. I know for a fact that he sold his male Spiders for over $17K each. And if he had more to sell, he would have had no problem selling them for that price.

When you compare how many people are out in this market with het Pieds and how many people have Spiders, it's ridiculous to say that Spiders are in such huge quantities that they were beiing sold at artificial prices. You say Spiders were being sold at inflated prices, and people were being pressured into keeping prices high. I don't know of anyone that had to keep their Spiders because they could not sell them at whatever price they chose to sell them for.

Pieds have been kept at an inflated price for a number of years, when you honestly think about the number of hets and poss hets out in peoples collections, Pieds should have come down in price a year or more ago. This year they dropped like a rock. Everyone that has hets and poss hets will have a difficult time making their money back on Pieds now, unless they have large quanties of het females and a few good breeding male Pieds.

At least with the Spiders you have better odds at producing visible morphs with just the investment of a male Spider and a few normal females...... and making your investment back your first season breeding Spiders should be easier to achieve.

Now I believe that recessive morphs are good money makers, but only for the people that are into the morph in the very beginning. Once there are hundreds of hets and poss hets sold, your ability of making a great deal of money is greatly reduced. You will be able to make your visible at a lower cost, but you will not make a ton of money on the morph, and that is why I think most people get into morphs to begin with. You like the way the animal looks, and you like the potential it has for making your investment back. That is good business.

If the scorn from other breeders is so great, why is it that you have people coming out with ads selling Spiders at $7K to $10K. These people that put such a low value on their animals have every right to price their animals at whatever value they feel is fair in their eyes. Maybe their animals are of inferior quality and they are having a difficult time selling them. Maybe they just want to make back their money as quickly as they can and they don't care about ruining the market. Which is poor business in my eyes.

I would not buy from someone that handles their business like that. They obviously don't care about the market and the business and they don't care about the people that are investing money in their animals. They are basically saying, as long as I make my money back, I don't care about anyone else. I can't imagine them lasting in business very long.

You don't see little boutiques that sell unusual clothing advertising that they have 3000 of these particular articles of clothing, but come in and buy one so you can be the first in your neighborhood. They put a couple out on the rack and when you buy, you feel special. Maybe that isn't completely fair, but it is business. And that is how business works. Anyone that believes that there are only 3 of those dresses in the world is naive, but at least they know they aren't being sold in Target or Walmart.

Anyone that wants to sell their animals will sell them, regardless of what the market dictates. There are always deals going on behind the scenes. Anyone that cries that they can't sell their animals shouldn't be blaming it on other breeders pressuring them ..... maybe it is them and the way they come off to potential buyers.

"I don't believe there is any peer pressure put on people to sell animals at artificially high prices."

...

"If the scorn from other breeders is so great, why is it that you have people coming out with ads selling Spiders at $7K to $10K. These people that put such a low value on their animals have every right to price their animals at whatever value they feel is fair in their eyes. Maybe their animals are of inferior quality and they are having a difficult time selling them. Maybe they just want to make back their money as quickly as they can and they don't care about ruining the market. Which is poor business in my eyes.

I would not buy from someone that handles their business like that. They obviously don't care about the market and the business and they don't care about the people that are investing money in their animals. They are basically saying, as long as I make my money back, I don't care about anyone else. I can't imagine them lasting in business very long."

If you wouldn't buy from someone who doesn't hold the agreed upon price that sounds like putting pretty good pressure on them to hold the price! Lots of people say this but in actuality I would imagine that if you wanted something you didn't already have you would look for the best deal (including quality) that you could find.

I agree that the incomplete dominant/co-dominant morphs are an excellent investment and perhaps even better than recessives. Especially if you have adult normal females and know how to breed them. Price fixing isn't new and isn't limited to dominant type morphs. It's just that the gap between the fixed asking price and the price at which the supply is really demanded opens much quicker with dominant type morphs.

However I also think that after the number of breeders with a morph gets to a certain point it's the buyers and not the sellers who determine the price at which the now large numbers of babies will move. The price is always an interaction between sellers (supply) and buyers (demand) but in the beginning the sellers have more control and in the end it's the buyers. I may be way out of line and lots of spiders may have moved at last year's list prices and all the drop between this year and last may be just to increased supply. It just seems like a suspiciously large drop that could have been caused by a break in ranks from holding a price last year where not many really moved. The real price is the price at which most of the available supply really sells. If the real price is lower than the common asking price the first breeder who advertises that price isn't lowering the price, the buyers already lowered it, that first breeder is just the one who comes clean and admits it. It seems to me that this is much more honest and less greedy to give the new buyers a better chance to make money by buying at the real price and not trying to get a few to pay the artificial price that can't last forever and is destined to take a large sudden drop when the price fixing fails.

I wish we had a good strong snake auction with lots of traffic and reputable sellers so everyone could see what the real prices are rather than each buyer having to negotiate what they think the real price is behind the scenes. I think the extra confidence this sort of a system would create (seeing the price that animals really sell for) would attract enough extra and confident investors that prices would probably hold even better than with price fixing and with more steady and predictable drops.

I said I wouldn't do business with someone if I don't like how they conduct their business. I didn't say that I wouldn't buy from someone simply because they were selling a certain morph cheap. If I bought a Spider from someone last year and I paid $17K for it, and then this year I saw them being one of the first to put out an ad for Spiders and they wanted $7K, I wouldn't be happy.

I think that is very bad business. Why would someone drop their prices $10K in just a few short months. Obviously to get the first sales and not care at all about the money that I invested in their animals several months earlier. There is no need for a $10K drop, no matter how many Spiders people think are out there. That is bogus.

I could see bringing them down to $14K, but to cut the price to less than half of what they were the year before is bad for business. Meaning their own business. It makes them look greedy, desperate and/or stupid.

And I don't think everyone is out there looking for the cheapest animals either. I would rather a good looking animal that is eating and pay a few dollars more, than an ugly animal that has never eaten.

Greed, desperation and stupidity are the biggest problems in any business. And that is what is wrong with the snake market, no matter what the morph.

Greed is a fact of human life. Sure it can be overdone but in it's most innocent and balanced form it's the motivation for capitalism (as opposed to envy - the motivation for communism).

I'm more bothered by the greed that lists a price much higher than the going price in the hopes of finding an uninformed sucker to pay it while at the same time cutting deals with educated buyers down to the real going price. If each year you do your best to determine and sell for the going price you don't have to put the screws to either our past or new potential customers. If the going price really did fall $10K in a year then that's just what the market did. Pretending it's still at $14K this year is just trying to pass the loss on to one more generation of breeders. Perhaps last year they where just pretending it was at $17K and those who paid that where the unlucky victims of fake prices that had to come back in line with reality eventually. Hopefully their animals will breed well and they’ll only take an extra year or two to recover.

I'm not trying to flame you, but I don't see what good paying the extra 3-4K for an animal would do? Yes, I understand that you might be fueling a trend, but unlike the stock market, the volume and reselling is so low that the effect of buying a lower priced animal has on the market is negligable

My honest opinion is that if someone wants to sell a snake for that little, they should just wholesale it out to a big breeder. It's quicker, less risk, and doesn't damage the market.

Matt

i have recently gotten into the ball python market and i think the spider is one of the coolest looking ones out there. i have 0.6 females, 1.1 pastels and looking to get a male spider next year sometime to start breading them to some of my females. i will admit that making some money is what i want to do and i want to make sure that 1-2 years from now i will be able to sell the spiders i produce. so you dont see a problem right ? thanks.

I know you weren’t asking me but ...

"spider is one of the coolest looking ones out there"

Given how cool spiders look I bet you will not have to give them away. You probably will not be able to sell them for what you bought their dad for a year or two earlier but you don't have to given that about half of his offspring from potentially several clutches should be spiders. They are just too cool looking to ever even get to the price of normals. Actually normals are only the price of normals because they can be harvested from the wild. With tens of thousands of them imported each year they still have a value and find homes. A captive bred animal that is in the eyes of many much superior will be worth much more.

I head a very well known breeder say I wish I had a lot of adult normal females to sell.......this was in 2002 @ the Vally Forge show.
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RicK @ BbI

Ball Boutique,Inc.
The home of the singing snakes!

Like everyone has said, it's supply and demand. as the supply of the dom morphs goes up the demand goes down and prices drop. another factor is that as the smaller breeders produce animals they basically have to drop their prices to be able to sell their animals to below "market" value. Anyone with a bit of common sence knows you won't buy from the smaller breeder that has yet to make a name for himself when you can buy from a huge breeder with a great reputation for the same money. Granted it only takes a few hundred dollar drop to be able to move your animals quickly to get a return on your investment. But you must always remember, ball pythons aren't going to be a breeders only market forever. Selling 5-10 spiders at 8k is just as good as selling 20 pieds at 4k or 40 albino's at 2k. spiders and some of these other morphs are wonderful but not as extreme looking as pieds or even albino's. once an animal get's to pet lvl prices is there going to be a large enough demand to move the number of animals that are being produced?
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2.0 het pied
1.1 het albino
1.7 normal
1.0 american pit bull terrior
1.1 damn taco dogs (ankle biters)
1.0 grey cat

a BAD dog is MADE not bred, support the American Pit Bull Terrior as the greatest breed of dogs on Earth!!!!!

Everyone and their mother has an adult male, that's what is going on. LOL
Every other ad is a spider....Supply and Demand

Mike Brooks
TNS Reptiles
Long Island, NY
631-732-4233

So, if everyone has an adult male Spider, then I suppose you have one.

Funny, when I look at the classifieds I see more Pastel ads than anything else. There's around 22 ads right now for Pastels, including Blonde and het for this and that. There are 8 Spider ads and 9 Albino ads. Seeing as Spiders have been around for several years, it's about time there were more than just one or two ads.

sdr
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Jim Perron
Python Passion Reptiles
pythonpassion@hotmail.com
www.pythonpassionreptiles.com