Quitting With a Horse - Selling

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 13 years 2 weeks ago

The most obvious way to remove a horse from your racing barn is to put it up for sale.

There are four main ways to sell a horse.

CLAIMING RACES
Hoping somebody claims a horse from you is the least reliable way to part company, in my experience, especially if the horse hasn’t been doing well. The older a horse is, it’s even more unlikely, even if that horse has been highly consistent. Claiming prices are almost always higher than what the horses in those races would go for on the sales page, so there’s few buyers willing to over-spend.

Still, it happens. I’ve had geldings claimed from me for as much as $85,000. Of course, claims are more likely to happen with fillies, since they are in greater demand. But if you’re eager to get rid of a horse, I wouldn’t wait around for it to get claimed. Chances are that it won’t happen.


THE SALES PAGE
The good news is that you can put a horse on the sales page and forget about it. Either it’ll sell within 10 days, or it won’t. (In the latter case, it’ll be removed from the sales list.) The bad news is you have to figure out a price; and also because there’s so many horses for sale at any time, it’s hard for any one horse to get much notice from potential buyers.

One thing you can do is start with a price that seems high to you. Every couple of days that the horse doesn’t sale, keep lowering it. If you’re lucky, the horse will sell eventually. If it doesn’t, you might need to GP it instead.

As a general rule, fillies and mares tend to be more in demand later in the year, as the peak of breeding season approaches. Also as a general rule, geldings tend to be very difficult to sell, unless they have obvious *current* ability and a low price. (As in, just a few thousand dollars, unless he’s a genuine stakes horse.)

Don’t expect to sell a gelding that’s been off the board three straight races or something along that line. Also, the fact that the horse won a graded stakes race two years ago means nothing now, unless you luck into a naïve buyer. Nor does that fact that the horse has 100k+ plus in earnings when he’s now 7yos.

We all want to believe our horses have some kind of worth to someone else. The fact is, many horses don’t. There’s just too many horses out there for any particular one to matter much to most players. If you’re able to sell horses on the sales list for any price at all, be grateful.


AUCTIONS
To hold an auction, you have to pay game points to create one. (You can view the link on the left side of your home page to find out your options.) I have limited experience with holding auctions, but I do already have some firm opinions about them. The nice thing about them is that your ordinary horses can usually get looked at, and can often be sold for the minimum $1,000 bid. (Whereas, those same horses on the sale page wouldn’t even get a look.)

The bad thing about auctions is that your better horses can get away dirt cheap, because only one person bids on them. You might have SIM friends that tell you how excited they are to bid on your horses; but then they’ll go off and forget about the deadline for the auction and never get around to bidding. The latter is probably the biggest reason good horses go for crappy prices at auction – the players who are most interested in those horses aren’t around, or otherwise aren’t paying attention, when the auction concludes.

You can combat this problem by putting reserves on your better horses. But with reserves, you risk over-pricing the horses, and turning off potential buyers. Still, if you feel firmly that you don’t want to relinquish a horse unless it sells for X price, then the ability to place reserves is worth paying extra game points. I’ve actually had experiences of quality horses not meeting their reserve, but then selling them off the sales page for prices substantially *higher* than their reserve in the auction. You just never know in what venue you might find an eager buyer.


THE FORUM
As time goes on, I’ve become more and more a believer in using the “Auctions and Sales” board on the Forum to sell higher quality horses. I sort of hate to say that, because the board is already cluttered with various notices, so that any announcement can be kicked down the chronological list of messages and risk getting lost to obscurity before hardly anyone even sees it. Which in turn prompts a lot of “bumps” as notices compete for the top spot on the board.

Still, if you have a higher quality horse, there’s no question that the Forum is the best place to most quickly come to a price that you and the buyer both agree with. A popular method is to announce a horse you have available for sale, and then say you are selling for the best offer. You can announce a firm deadline for when you’ll accept offers, or simply decide to choose the best offer after a reasonable time period has passed (which is rarely longer than a few days). I’ve twice sold horses via the Forum for six figures each, when I would have be willing to accept 50k. You just never know what someone else is willing to pay, until you test the waters.

Some players will even hold auctions on the Forum, usually because they have just a few horses to sell. A possible problem with this is the same as for regular auctions – the players who are the most interested might not be paying attention to the deadline.

Also, the Forum is used as advertising for regular auctions and horses on the sales list. The obvious advantage of this advertising is that you can give details on the available horses, so lazy buyers don’t have to be bothered with clicking in and out each horse’s link.


It’s almost impossible to determine ahead of time the true worth of a horse. If you put it on the sales list and it sells right away, then you probably left money on the table, and wished you would have priced it higher. If you price it too high, and keep lowering, some players might ignore it outright because they’re just plain tired of seeing it on the sales page every day.

If a horse never sells, no matter what you do, or you just don’t have the patience to play around with different prices or methods, and waiting for the right buyer to come along, then you’ll probably have to be resigned to sending the horse to Greener Pastures and getting nothing for it. (Or pension it to your own pasture.) Still, better to do that, than have a horse in your racing barn that causes you continual frustration because you don’t want it anymore.

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