05/15/2024
Some good information and advice when looking for your next horse.
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When horse shopping, you may find yourself interacting with agents, rather than directly with owners. While there are certainly trainers and agents out there who are less scrupulous, remember that many sellers hire agents instead of just representing the horses themselves for banal reasons - the seller has a job outside of horses and doesn’t have the time, the seller doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to endure all that annoyance of selling horses, the seller would rather pay an experienced professional with a substantial network than try and do it alone, etc etc. Agents are paid commissions, and those commissions aren’t just about the number of minutes they’ve put into selling THAT horse - it’s about the years of experience and network building they’ve logged to become an agent the seller trusts.
Ditto shopping with an agent or with your coach. Yes, you need to pay them a commission for the time they’ve put in for you. But what you’re really paying for is the experience that person has in matching horses to riders with success, the experience working with veterinarians to determine what is a valid concern on a PPE and what is ephemera, and the networking to know which sellers’ agents are trustworthy and which ones are to be treated with skepticism.
Yes, an experienced horseman CAN safely fly solo through the world of horse sales. But even those of us with experience still use agents to simplify the process, and the inexperienced should absolutely use qualified help. The cost of a commission to match you with your dream horse is VASTLY less expensive than going it alone and ending up with a bad match.