Selling Leopard Geckos?

[Fluffball176]

It's about the age where I start thinking about what I want to do for a living, and since I like reptiles so much I figured I should work with them. One thing that interests me is breeding. Leopard Geckos seem to be a good idea, since they're easy to care for, and can be placed in a rack system.

Now of course my plan is still in an early stage, and I have a LOT of research to go (which I WILL do). The question that has been on my mind is selling. I know that if I plan on profiting (or even selling for that matter) leos then I'll need morphs. Problem is I don't know where to sell, or even where to start. I doubt a pet store would work, I don't know how to get myself noticed as a breeder, or how a website would work with part of the year being unprofitable to me.

Another thing is I don't know what morphs to even try. I don't know what kind of leo morphs I might be able to breed (I plan on working a summer job to help pay for all this), or how much to buy/sell them for.

I know this is a lot to ask, but it'll help me get an idea on what to do. Thanks!

 

[im faster]

Well in order to make any money breeding leopard geckos you need to build a reputatoin which can take years..

and have MANY geckos to be able to produce enough to make a profit over cost.

most start out as a hobby and gradually work there way up..

i will be lucky to get close to breaking even this year.. personally

 

[fl_orchidslave]

Not only does it take years to build a sound reputation as a breeder, but years to turn a profit. It's definitely not a money making venture in a flooded market and bad national economy.

 

[ElapidSVT]

yeah, there's like 2 guys in the country that solely make their living breeding leopard geckos. maybe there's a couple more, but it's nothing most people are going to make much money at for a long time.

it's a great hobby and breeding them is exciting when the new babies start hatching out.
each female can possibly produce 16 offspring from a single mating so you'll have to decide how many animals you really want to raise. it's much simpler to breed them than it is to sell all the animals that you produce.

the way to get noticed is to learn everything about the animals until you know all the morphs and can identify them from photos, then you can help new folks out in the forum so people will know your name and that you know your animals. during that time you'll undoubtedly be adding animals to your collection which will be the foundation of your breeding program. buy the best animals you can afford and ones that you enjoy since you'll probably end up keeping most of the offspring at first. once you've been keeping leos for a year or so you'll have a better idea of what sells and how much they sell for so that by the time you start breeding you'll be on top of things.

good luck!

 

[TokayKeeper]

It's definitely not a money making venture in a flooded market and bad national economy.

Ding ding ding ding!

 

[Golden Gate Geckos]

age where I start thinking about what I want to do for a living

Well, I can say after nearly 16 years as a breeder that you will NOT be able to make a living breeding, but you will work 50 hours a week and be lucky to break even. It is a wonderful hobby, though!

 

[MiamiLeos]

I'm not sure I know of anyone who makes their living off of breeding exclusively leos. Many, many people work with them because they are so popular and relatively easy to breed and care for. But they also work with various other herps to help counter balance the near next to nothing profit the leos bring in. Leos are loads of fun, but here's the issue with them;

It takes a mere year, sometimes less, to grow up a healthy adult female for breeding. This female can then produce up to 16 offspring each year... if you have two or three producing females, that's a LOT of geckos. The market is overflowing right now. There's simply just too many geckos, more than people are looking for. Now on top of that, the morph craze is slowing down. We've made much of what is possible and uncovered most of the hidden genes (not to say there are'nt new morphs hiding out there). So with all this combined, it just makes for a crappy market.

If you're looking to have a profitable business that you can actually live on, you will need to venture into several other animals becides leos. Ball pythons are a good place to start, maybe add some colubrids, boas, etc. One other thing you will notice about people who make a profit off herps is their sheer quantity of animals - usually rooms and rooms filled with herps. It will definitely take a huge commitment and you will enevitably come up short some years, especially the first few. The biggest thing you should worry about now is your reputation. Get your name out there. Start breeding some leos, any morphs you like, and making good customer relations. Have fun with it. Even if it doesnt turn into a full fledged business, it's all still in good fun

 

[TokayKeeper]

I gotta disagree with the balls. Their market, from what I've seen at shows, is just about as slow and saturated as the leo gecko market. The same goes for corns, kings, and milks. People saw $$$ and moved to those easy to breed species in hopes of making a quick buck. The thing I still have a hard time fathoming were all the piebald balls I saw 10 years ago selling for $50-75K. I hope people made their money on that "investment" because I know of an acquaintance that purchased a female 50% white pied at the Arlington NARBC show for $600.

Years ago you could find all sorts of "cheap" gecko species available, trash species if you will. Years ago you could find a nicely varied assortment of day geckos. Now the classifieds are barron, only to be riddled with the same species and the same breeders posting them over and over again on KS.com. You can't even find plain ole normal, non-het for anything leopard geckos anymore (well, except the 2 I have in my collection). I'm not a normal, wild-type purist, but sometimes those are still the most awesome morph within a species. Breeders, as a whole, didn't take the time to wisely produce these morphs. Look at some of the tail deformities seen in leopard gecko; short tails, crocked tails, or kink tails. Look at how morpholigically (skeletally) weird super snows look. And now everything has to have the giant gene in it. Breeders aren't taking the time to outcross, it's all about the quick buck.

 

[MiamiLeos]

I definitely see what you're saying and agree to some extent. However, I feel the ball market will stay pretty stable for two reasons alone; 1- there are just so many morphs, you will never have enough of each, and 2- they don't reproduce quick enough to satisfy their demand. I do agree that when a new ball morph is found, such as the pieds were 10 years ago, that the prices are outrageous. But I'm fairly confident that now that the pied market has had time to level out that the animals themselves are a good investment and will continue to hold their value. Another thing to consider with balls is that the bigger they get, the more they're worth. Their value just increases upon itself, unlike with leos who have a pretty much set price from juvy to adulthood with only slight gain. Just my $0.2

 

[AMoriarty]

You may find this article useful: http://www.geckotime.com/breeding-l...com/breeding-leopard-geckos-on-a-small-scale/

Also, have you thought about doing something like going into zookeeping, biology, or veterinary medicine?

 

[M_surinamensis]

there are just so many morphs, you will never have enough of each, and 2- they don't reproduce quick enough to satisfy their demand.

I'm not so great at... y'know... tact. So I'll just get this out of the way quickly, like pulling off a band-aid. You're wrong on both counts.

Now, that said, it's not surprising that you arrived at those conclusions for a few reasons; from the comparative rate of market saturation to the marketing tactics of some of the full time producers. The exact same forces which saturate the demand for a leopard gecko or corn snake morph occur with ball pythons, they just happen slightly slower due to a lower reproductive rate.

The offspring potentially produced by the adult animals in captivity every year will exceed the current total captive population.* In the case of morphs that have not been dropped in price down to roughly the same cost as a normal, it is virtually guaranteed. Even ball pythons, with their comparatively slow maturation and their small clutch sizes will produce more than currently exist; a 1.5 breeding group is reasonable, even if you assume a clutch average of about six eggs you're getting thirty offspring from those pairings. The ratio of production (or potential production) to demand creates steep drops in price and sharp increases in availability after a genotype has been established. The exact genetic transmission of the morph can accelerate or decelerate it a bit, codominant or dominant traits get cheaper faster, combinations of multiple recessive qualities retain value longer (and produce a lot of possible hets in the process).

Pastels are the most notorious example of extreme over-saturation of the market causing a price drop that many smaller scale investment breeders regarded as cataclysmic. Albinos were getting pretty cheap until the introduction of axanthism and the temporary rise in interest over snow projects. Pieds are a bit tougher to really map out because the specific portions and patterns are highly variable and the aesthetics of the appearance dictate price but low-white animals are relatively inexpensive and getting lower every year.

There are really two tactics to making money with the morph market. One is to take the long approach, putting in the effort to establish a reputation for quality and to carefully and selectively produce animals in such a fashion so that the returns are lower than the overhead and the initial investments are recouped. The other is to accurately predict just how saturated a market is and get into it and produce animals for sale during seasons when the price is relatively stable or when the drop is still going to be profitable for a season or two past the investment point. Or, ideally, both. The species which have a slower reproductive rate have longer price plateaus and consequentially are slightly easier to predict, the ones with quicker reproductive rates drop faster but produce far more offspring at each plateau (meaning they can potentially be more valuable over a shorter period of time).

Do not ever... ever... trust someone who tells you that you can make a high investment in some morph and then sell the offspring for a price equal to what you're paying though. Maturation time and all the other mooks out there breeding the exact same thing will kill what you think of as your investment. The big-name full time morph machine breeders know this and they will not sell you something that makes you vast quantities of free money, no matter how shiny their display at Daytona is or how big their ad in Reptiles magazine may be. There are a few in particular, especially in the ball market, who piss me off royally with the way they give sales pitches touting their morphs as a surefire investment, but I don't think this is an appropriate place to name names.

*except in extremely rare cases where the reproductive rate is less than two offspring per female annually. Prehensile tailed skinks come to mind.

 

[Golden Gate Geckos]

Do not ever... ever... trust someone who tells you that you can make a high investment in some morph and then sell the offspring for a price equal to what you're paying though.

This is a FACT.

 

[M_surinamensis]

There was a sort of lecture/presentation/sales pitch given by one of the bigger breeders of ball morphs during the Daytona Expo in... I think 2005 (give or take a year) that really, really irritated me on that count. I was watching a video a friend had shot and brought home, had I been present I think I would have heckled.

The sales pitch basically said that ball pythons were a surefire investment, spend twenty thousand dollars on a pair of animals and in three years make eighty thousand dollars selling eight offspring. Which is not remotely how it works in practice. It is more like spend twenty thousand, invest more money in maintenance and care along with time and effort. Then provided nothing has gone wrong, attempt to encourage the animals to reproduce, hope for a large clutch that isn't guaranteed and then worry yourself sick over beating the incubation odds. If you were smart enough to start with exceptional looking animals and they happened to pass that on you might have higher end offspring which you need to spend more time and effort making ready for sale. Then when they have put some weight on and you're ready to ship them out (a hurdle that can change from day to day between simplicity and impossibility) you find that the market average for the morph has dropped to two-three thousand dollars per animal and you're in direct competition with the person who sold you yours three years ago, except they kept all the best looking ones as holdbacks and have an established name and deal with significant enough volume so that they can choose to ride out or drop prices during sales slumps... so you end up selling yours for the low end price, again worrying yourself sick over the condition of the animals, the risks of shipping and the responses of your customers to maybe make ten or twelve thousand dollars, if you're lucky.

By the time morphs are readily available for sale to the general public, even at the higher prices, the genotype is established enough so that it'll probably be two or three successful years of breeding before the investment shows any profit and even that assumes that the public interest remains reasonable. Which is nothing to complain about if you really enjoy doing it, it's just difficult to make a living that way.

As a generalization the slower breeding species retain value longer, but that also means that a person looking to make money through breeding is probably trying to anticipate supply and demand several years in advance. Species like leopard geckos are less likely to remain high priced for long (maturation rate, clutch sizes and temp sexing all make it easier to produce more faster) but it's generally a bit easier to gauge the market conditions, although the mass breeders tend to throw a monkey wrench in production schedules of smaller operations, especially startup companies which don't have a reputation to bank on.

 

[tlbowling]

So basically Fluffball...look for another career choice


It was a nice thought though

 

[Fluffball176]

Thanks for all the information everyone. I might be a little discouraged lol, but at the same time I need to specify on something. I don't have leopard geckos picked out as the reptile to breed if I choose to become a breeder, but rather to help me get into the hobby/job of breeding. If I where to breed reptile, I obviously wouldn't stick with one species (especially after reading all the replies to this), but leos seem like a good place to start (as a hobby).

I plan on editing my post to be more clear, so please keep giving me advice. I'd love to hear it, and I'd love to have any other ideas or tips! Thanks everyone.

 

[Fluffball176]

I guess that I can't edit, but I might make another thread if people aren't reading these two replies before posting. Once again I'd like to just start with leos to get a basic idea of what I'd be getting myself into with breeding. I'd still need to know where to sell these leos I'd breed.

 

[acpart]

Here's another article that will tell you about selling geckos: http://www.geckotime.com/how-to-sell-your-geckos/

Aliza

 

[KelliH]

I make a living as a leopard gecko breeder. Barely. Unless you are ok with being poor, I would say keep it as a small hobby.

 

[KelliH]

I guess that I can't edit, but I might make another thread if people aren't reading these two replies before posting. Once again I'd like to just start with leos to get a basic idea of what I'd be getting myself into with breeding. I'd still need to know where to sell these leos I'd breed.

Where to sell the geckos? That's really all up to you. Online, at reptile shows, to wholesalers or pet shops, at your local herp society meetings, wherever. Figuring out where to sell leopard geckos is not the difficult thing; figuring out how to sell them is.

 

[Fluffball176]

Where to sell the geckos? That's really all up to you. Online, at reptile shows, to wholesalers or pet shops, at your local herp society meetings, wherever. Figuring out where to sell leopard geckos is not the difficult thing; figuring out how to sell them is.

There's only one petstore around here that would even consider buying my leos, and I hate it. They're overpriced on everything ($70 for baby Green Iguanas, $120 for normal baby beardies, ect.), and take poor care of their reptiles. Two leos had crypto and for over a week they where still on sale (for well over $100), rather than being taken off and euthanized by a vet. When I asked their reptile "expert" he said they had been taken off display and put in the back for them to die. That "expert" also didn't know how to sex an adult leo, and I had to do it myself.

I had also planned on contacting my local herp society club for information on reptile shows, and maybe their advice. But what do you mean how to sell them is the difficult part? I know I won't make money from selling, but I'm hoping that I could loose less by selling.