Anyone else notice it's getting harder to sell Raptors?

[neubauer geckos]

Anyone else notice it's getting harder to sell Raptors?I listed a bunch for a few months with nothing,so I took them to the LPS for credit b/c I didn't want to feed what I wasn't interested in breeding.Now I'm trying to sell a Raptor,and Ember,and a reverse stripe Tremper het Raptor and have had no interest.I don't think my prices are too high.I have also noticed many others trying to sell,but the adds being posted over and over and over and over,well you get the point.Anyone else having this problem,or know why this is?Thanks!

 

[miiike]

It's very easy to breed Leopard Geckos and the market can't support how many are currently being bred.

 

[TokayKeeper]

couldn't happen to be because everyone and their brother works with that morph, or some variant of it, could it?

 

[Thorgecko707]

The market is flooded. But it is a hobby after all. It's not a money maker.

 

[jimbo0204]

make your hobby still a hobby...and you don't feel about that

 

[artgecko]

It seems like what you are saying is that they are harder to sell at your price point than they were previously. You may have to lower your price or change your marketing.

I sold 3 raptors at a local expo last weekend, but not for as much as I had anticipated when I bought my first RAPTORS. Still, I haven't seen many being offered at the shows around here. So I think I can sell the rest if I keep the price reasonable (what the market will pay).

I agree that there are too many leos available to support the higher prices. But I also would like to see the nicer leos being offered for a price that drives the low quality ones out of the market all together. I've already made the investment in the breeders, and now it doesn't cost anymore to breed/feed raptors than bland looking tremper albinos.

 

[Northstar Herp]

Seems like I remember back in the fall, somebody around your area not buying a nice RAPTOR male of mine because shipping was around the same price I would take for the gecko... welcome to breeding and selling leopard geckos.

It's simple supply and demand- supply is up, demand goes down, and with goes the price.

 

[TokayKeeper]

But I also would like to see the nicer leos being offered for a price that drives the low quality ones out of the market all together. I've already made the investment in the breeders, and now it doesn't cost anymore to breed/feed raptors than bland looking tremper albinos.

That's counter productive to the process of outcrossing. It's also the reasoning why it's harder to find classic morphs used for combining. But while everyone is flooding the market with the high-end stuff, I'm working on the exact opposite with the hatching of 2 super rare critters 2 days ago. They're called normals, not many people seem to know what they are anymore, and even more special is that fact that they are unknowingly het for anything other than normal. Your very thinking is why it's hard to find normals or anything not in the "super" form of codominant traits. A real student of the game realizes that not only are those $500-1500 nicer leos important, but so are the "low quality" ones that originated those nicer animals, on down to even simple normals. By having those lower quality animals around one assumingly has the ability to keep lines genetically strong. In evolution, these phenomena are known as genetic drift and genetic bottleneck. You definitely don't want to bottleneck your genetic lines to the point of recurring deformities, or worse deleterious traits/lethal combinations - both of which strongly act upon decreasing the fitness of an individual and/or population.