It almost seems too good to be true: Dozens of well-bred horses for sale, with useful photos and videos provided and perhaps even radiographs, all available to purchase in one place at the same time. And often you don’t even have to be there in person, because the whole enterprise may be online and livestreamed. 

Sport horse auctions seem to be popping up everywhere, and they promise a streamlined buying experience by bringing motivated sellers and buyers together and letting market forces determine prices. No longer does one have to drive three hours to a farm in the middle of nowhere, only to find the young horse you’re interested in uncatchable and covered in mud in a paddock. No more making an appointment only to have the horse sold before you get there. At an auction, everyone has a chance to bid, and if you’re the highest bidder, the horse is yours—simple as that. 

Is there a catch? There must be a catch, right? If you’ve only ever purchased horses by dealing directly with the seller (perhaps with a trainer acting as intermediary on either end), elite auctions can seem complicated at best, and maybe sketchy at worst. 

The phrase “caveat emptor” (buyer beware) surely applies to any kind of horse sale, and auctions are no exception. Do your due diligence, make sure you understand the rules, fees and policies of the particular auction you’re participating in, and definitely seek out guidance from professionals who have used that auction to be sure it is trustworthy and has a good reputation. But if you’ve done all your homework, a sport horse auction can be an efficient—and perhaps even fun—way to purchase horses at a variety of price points. 

One-Stop Shopping

The main draw of an auction? “The horses are ready when we see them,” Martin Videla said simply. 

Videla spent a good portion of his career in the sport horse auction industry, starting at the age of 15 in his native Argentina helping prepare horses for auction and eventually running his own auctions. Now based in the U.S., he and his wife, Rachel Clough, run Rancho Pampa, a hunter/jumper training facility in Aiken, South Carolina. Videla takes clients back to Argentina every year to shop for prospects at one of the major auctions. 

“The private [horse] sale is not a system that is well managed, for the most part,” he explained. “When you go to private farms, you’re going to get there, and the horses are dirty; they have not been jumped in seven weeks, and they come out and they’re [rude] around the free jump. Or they’re totally non-trained, so [there might be] seven of us trying to chase the horse around to see if he would jump.” 

“It’s easier to go to an auction and say [to clients], ‘Hey, we’re going to see a lot of 3-year-olds; if we like something, there’s going to be an auction. The market’s going to say if it’s worth X or Y, and we can agree to that or not,’ ” he said. “Those horses are ready; they are being sold today. If the price, quality, health matches, we’re in; if not, we can keep going.” 

For Katie Malensek, DVM, it was also the efficiency of the process that drew her to purchase several young eventing prospects from the Monart Sale in Ireland. 

“Because I work full time, I don’t have time to go and look and try a lot of these horses. And a lot of them, what I buy anyways, are unbroke,” said Malensek, a small animal veterinarian in Ormond Beach, Florida, who has evented through the CCI4*-L level. 

“I think normally it’s just much faster [to buy through an auction]. It’s a very efficient way to look at young horses,” she added. “If you’ve narrowed it down to 15 horses you really like, to quickly go back after you’ve seen that many, they all a little bit start to look the same, and the really nice ones start to stand out to you. So it’s really easy to then just look back through and be like, ‘No, never mind. I don’t like that one as much,’ and then compare them really quickly and be like, ‘Yeah, that one is clearly a standout compared to these ones.’ So it makes it really quick and efficient to be able to see the video, see the bloodlines, see all those things. And you’re not spending a ton of time combing through ads and YouTube videos, where this video didn’t load right, and this one’s lighting is bad. It’s all in a universal format, so it’s really easy to compare them.” 

For Kelley Corrigan, the choice to purchase through an auction in 2017 actually wasn’t hers. Her trainer, Havens Schatt, had been shopping in Germany and found Diatendro, a then 6-year-old Hanoverian stallion (Diarado—Cobina). 

“She tried the horse and really liked it, and sent the videos to me,” Corrigan said. She agreed and wanted to go ahead with the purchase. “Havens said, ‘Well, you can’t,’ ” Corrigan recalled with a laugh. 

Diatendro was committed to go through the Performance Sales International Auction in Germany, and if Corrigan, an ‘R’ hunter/jumper/equitation judge who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, wanted him, she’d have to get him through the auction, she said. 

Although unexpected, the experience turned out very positive. “He was the first horse I bought through an auction, although Havens had done a fair amount of it,” Corrigan said. 

She was able to travel to Germany early and try the horse before the auction, but she noted that the horses are being tried by multiple people, and in her case most were looking for jumpers, not hunters, so were asking him to go in a different way. “When I got on him, I literally just jumped a couple of jumps to make sure I liked him,” she said, in a very abbreviated trial. 

But their initial impressions held true for his future career in the hunter ring. “First and foremost, he’s stunning,” Corrigan said, adding that he “looks the part” that hunter judges are looking for. “He’s got a great jump, a very consistent jump, and he’s a good mover. And he seemed willing.” 

Schatt competed the horse in the professional divisions and hunter derbies, while Corrigan did the amateur-owners. “I’ve been doing more of the showing the last two years and we’re really starting to click now,” she said. Most recently they won the amateur-owner, 36 and over, championship at the National Horse Show (Kentucky). 

Since then, she has also purchased one of Diatendro’s sons through an auction. 

Get Good Guidance

For Videla, knowing the players—the sellers providing the horses, and the people running the auction—is paramount. And as a professional who is going to be a repeat customer, Videla knows that the auction wants to continue to get his business in the years to come. Dealing with an unknown entity is more of a gamble. 

“If I go to an auction that I do not know the backstory, I will have $5,000 or $6,000 to spend. If I know the backstory, it could be three or four times that. I don’t want to invest and put money on someone else that then is going to turn around and show me his back. So I want to do business with people that are going to back it up,” he said. “I don’t want to gamble in your house. If I’m going to have more than one gamble—a horse is [a gamble] already—I don’t want to do it. And I cannot walk anyone into the process if I don’t trust it.” 

Malensek said she’d always advise someone buying through an auction to seek a professional’s advice, both on the auction itself and the horses offered. She relied on the advice and contacts of her trainer, Karl Slezak, when making her auction purchases. 

“I definitely said, ‘Hey, check out this number and this number.’ Just to kind of get his opinion,” she said. “And if he said, ‘No, I don’t like that one’s leg,’ or, ‘I don’t like what it did in the jog video,’ he’s got a very good eye for that, where I might have glossed over it. And it’s so easy. [The auction videos] are little clips, so they don’t take forever to watch; you just pull up the number, and you can watch it really quickly. So it’s not like you’re drowning through 20 minutes of badly taken schooling videos.” 

Since Malensek doesn’t go to the auction in person and is viewing the horses exclusively online, she also makes sure to have eyes on the ground. 

“I did get a pretty feral one once. It looked quite easy on the videos, and it was not easy,” she said. “Now I know enough people that are over there and go over there for the sales that I just pay someone a couple hundred bucks to go and put their hands on it. Go to the stall, meet the vendor. Look at the horse’s eye, look at its reaction. Is it terrified when you walk in the stall? Is it cowering in the corner because it’s never seen a person in its stall before? Or does it walk up to you and is kind, and lets you put your hands on its back, and it doesn’t try to leave. That, to me, I think is worth it. Even if you really don’t know the person that well, if you can just have somebody go and just give you some feedback on what it was like outside of the sale ring, it can really give you some feedback on, you know, ‘What am I getting into?’ Especially if you’re the one doing the breaking when it comes home.” 

Although Corrigan was set to attend the PSI Auction with Schatt when she purchased Diatendro, Schatt fell ill the night before and wasn’t well enough to go. “We were very lucky that we knew some people over there who spoke very good English,” she said. (The auction is conducted in German.) “And one of the guys we know from PSI came and kind of helped us. He stood by our table and helped us bid.”

Trust, But Verify

The resources available for vetting a horse will vary by auction. The Monart auction, Malensek said, advertises the horses as having had a pre-purchase exam and X-rays available. But she cautioned that the films might not be as extensive as one would find in the U.S.

“I’m very critical of the X-rays, because I know eventually they might be resold, and even though I’m not that picky, I do want to make sure that they’re going to pass a U.S. standard,” she said. “So I will always, always, always look at the X-rays, and then also have my equine vet look at them for a U.S. standard, because often even though they’ve got the X-rays, it doesn’t mean their X-rays are clean, it just means they have a set of X-rays, right?

“You can also consult with the vet that’s done the pre-purchase, but—I’m not trying to be insulting to any particular vet; I found this pretty much universal—their standards are not what we would consider standard [in the U.S.],” she continued. “I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I think there’s too much put into pre-purchases over here. But I also feel like if you don’t know for sure that’s going to be your forever horse, you have to buy it thinking you might have to resell it at some point. And if it’s got a game-changing set of X-rays, you might not want to get involved, especially if it’s 3.”

Videla said the Argentinian auctions will usually offer a basic set of X-rays. “So we know a little bit of [the horse’s] health, and we can send a vet to do more X-rays or a full exam. You cover your bases that way,” he said. “Unfortunately, you’re going to open up your cards when you send someone to vet a horse, but you need to do it because it’s expensive not to do it.”

Vetting is one more area where a level of trust with the seller is paramount, he said, because you’re on their home turf.

“How many vets do you know in the Czech Republic or Southern France? So you fall into the hands of the seller,” he said. “You need to trust the guy; you need to go through their process, and it’s tough. Once you start going around, and you listen to what happened to different people, the X-rays were not the X-rays, and the horse was not the horse … blah, blah, blah. There are very slick people out there that can get you. That’s why you need to have some local insight to help you through the process.”

It’s also important to just do a basic level of due diligence, Videla added. Double check pedigrees and registrations. Normally, in Argentina, the auction rules state that you have 30 days to do any bloodwork required before the horse can be exported, he said. Even if you’re not planning to export the horse right away—perhaps it’s to stay in Argentina for training—you want to go ahead and do the export bloodwork, because if there are issues, you can get your money back in that 30-day window. But after that, Videla said, it’s your horse, and any issues are on you.

Don’t Get Carried Away

There’s no arguing that part of the allure of auctions is that they’re fun. “It can be a great way to buy; it was a great experience, and I feel like I got a fair price,” said Corrigan. “And if you want to get wined and dined, PSI is the way to go.”

Even if you are bidding from afar, as Malensek does, the process can be a little bit intoxicating.

“I will say I am a competitive person, and 100% that becomes part of my issue for sure. We were sitting at the bar [after the Tryon International (North Carolina)] last fall, and there was one that was interesting to me that we were watching, and I bid on it a few times,” she said. “And I swear it was just because we were starting to get into the competition of it, and everyone’s sitting around like, ‘Did you get it? Did you get it?’ I finally just had to give my phone to my sister and be like, ‘Don’t let me see that phone again until that auction is closed!’ And we ended up owning him! But it’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement of wanting to win, you know, and then all of a sudden that number turns into a wire transfer you have to make.”

Making a budget and sticking to it, even in the excitement of the moment, is extremely important said Clough.

“Of course in any auction it’s very easy to go above what you can or should, because you’re caught up in that excitement,” she said. “Martin usually talks with his clients, and they have a very clear plan of what they’re going to do. There is absolutely strategy involved with how you’re bidding, how much you’re bidding, when you’re bidding. And I won’t say that it’s something you must do with a professional, but I think it’s certainly helped, because there’s some gamesmanship that goes on.”

Other Auction Tips:

• Be aware of fees, taxes and commissions that are added onto the sale price, and factor those into your budget. The auction houses all spell these out online in their rules. 

• You can often find additional information on, or video of, horses for sale by looking up the sellers on social media. “What I’ve learned is to look at who’s selling the horse, and then go search them online, either their barn or their individual social media pages, because often they’re going to be promoting [the horse] in some other way. So you get a little impression beyond just the auction video,” said Katie Malensek. 

• Although there are lots of logistics involved after the auction, as far as getting the horse ready to eventually depart for the U.S., the process is normally quite easy from the buyer’s point of view because the auction houses have connections with shippers, and everyone there knows the process. 

• It’s often much less expensive to leave a horse abroad for some of its initial training. Sellers or auction houses may have contacts for this as well. 

---

This article originally appeared in the Dec. 18-25, 2023, issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse and our lifestyle publication, Untacked. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.