If a trainer I was using ever talked shit about my horse to other trainers/clients/people because I wasn’t using them to sell my horse and thus not paying them a commission, they’d no longer be my trainer. Wildly unprofessional.
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This ^^
As an European, it boils my blood how horribly commercialized is the equestrian sport in the US! I’ve been riding professionally in several countries, I’ve never seen it so bad as it’s in here…
FFS it’s my horse, my time and my efforts! The trainer gets paid their monthly fee, which is enough so why is the OP obliged to share another 10-15% on top of that? Argh!
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How easy or hard the horse was to sell is irrelevant. I think you put yourself in a very awkward position to not discuss ahead of time how the commission was going to be handled.
Like it or not, the modern H/J business model has trainers depending on sales and lease commissions as a significant part of their livelihood. It may not be the greatest system, but I do believe that trainers are entitled to make a living (provided they are professional and doing their job). Having the backdrop of a reputable trainer and barn likely was a significant factor in the quick sale of your horse and probably factored into the price you were able to get. Additionally, I think it was professional and responsible that your trainer attended showings and was there for the PPE. The presence of a trainer at showings can be very important…in some cases people will “test out” a horse in an inappropriate manner if there is not an authoritative party watching out for the horse. Also, I would not discount the presence of your trainer at the vetting–that is a very important task and a responsible party needs to be there. Lastly, I think it would be naive to assume that your trainer did not field phone calls or have conversations with other trainers (including the buyer’s trainer) about your horse. I think it is highly likely that the buyer’s trainer called your trainer to discuss the horse. Reality is that the buyer’s trainer is going to be much more interested in what another trainer has to say about the horse vs. what the owner (in most cases an amateur) has to say.
IMO, your trainer deserves a commission greater than simply the sum of the value of the actual time s/he spent on the sale. Your trainer’s program, reputation and availability all played into the sale. Maybe 10% is too high in your opinion, but I think that by failing to discuss that ahead of time you are not in a great position to negotiate. Overall, I would count your blessings that your horse sold quickly to a suitable situation, and be prepared to pay whatever your trainer’s standard commission is.
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It’s 15-20% here to buy/sell.
10% sounds like a bargain.
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This commission, no commission discussion is another reason why any respectable trainer should be screaming for licensing of his/her profession. It’s absurd that we agree to things not in advance and not in writing and then complain when there is a misunderstanding. It’s absurd that an industry that generates as much money as horse ownership involves can be entered into by any yahoo who says “I’m a trainer”. Every respectable trainer from the top of the pile to the bottom should cringe when these things and worse, happen. They are all in the same bucket and yet, there is no outcry from the BNT or no so BNT to license people. If you want to do someone’s fingernails, you have a licensure requirement for pete’s sake. One last rant, my dentist would not charge me less if I refused to let the hygenist floss and polish my teeth at a cleaning. So if these “professional horse trainers” charge 10% or 90% commission, doing some of the horse selling for them shouldn’t result in a reduced fee. Unless, of course, you are not dealing with professionals working in an industry. But then, you aren’t, are you???
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Well said!
To the OP first. You owe a commission for two reasons:
- You didn’t discuss if first.
But you did do lots of the rest of the initial work, like a good business-person, so why omit this step? Since the mistake is on your side of the table-- the assumption that you might not be paying your pro’s regular percentage-- you might have to eat this owed fee and consider it “tuition.”
- You didn’t have to do all the work you did. You could have told your pro to get your horse sold, stepped back and let her earn that 10%.
That’s not how i would have done it, since I’m potentially making 90% of the money on the deal and I generally like have a front-row seat to my financial transactions. But the work you did was part of what you were paying for.
Which leads me to this response below:
See, that “commission for just a speck of work” in a horse sale makes no sense to me, though I know it’s common in the industry. If I had an inexpensive horse to sell, and there wasn’t much profit for anyone to have and I could/was doing most of the work, I’d much rather pay my pro for her time.
When I have shopped for inexpensive horses with clients (and I was a small-time pro with even smaller-time clients, so there were going to be a whole line of frogs to kiss before we found the prince), I had them pay me for my time to see the horses. I’d watch and critique video for free… so long as they were taking my points to heart and were bringing me gradually better prospects to look at.
My feeling was that they were buying education along the way. I was being compensated fairly and I wasn’t making a bet that on their finding a horse.
In any business, I don’t love the “lottery mentality” where you do lots of work and only rarely get paid when all the stars line up and a horse changes hands. But that’s just me wanting transparency around all things financial.
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Wait a sec. You told the pro to sell your horse, pro didn’t advertise it, you did and generated the sale? Putting subjects in those sentences would have made it more clear who didn’t do some work.
That would be my basis for asking the pro to give back some of her 10%. Again, so, so many people in this biz think of commissions being paid to the “key man” who gets the deal done-- e.g. the third party trainer who makes a single phone call connecting buyer and seller and wants to get paid for that. If commissions go to key men and not people who did the lion’s share of the work, then you, the author of the ad, are the one who should get paid.
And, following my logic above, the pro had the opportunity to earn all of her commission by getting off her duff and marketing the horse. I mean, how was any commission going to be paid at all without marketing?
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OP says she posted an ad and forwarded these two buyers to the trainer.
We have no idea what legwork the trainer was/wasn’t doing on the back end. For all we know the trainer spent hours on the phone calling other trainers to tell them the horse was for sale. The mere fact that the owner placed an ad doesn’t mean the trainer wasn’t doing legwork on the back end. OP seems to assume trainer wasn’t, but she also hasn’t asked (seems to want to avoid talking about the whole thing, for some reason).
And the trainer did do work here…
There were 2 showings to 2 different potential buyers. OP was out of town and unavailable to handle. Trainer handled both of those showings for the OP.
There was also a PPE. OP offered to come but trainer ultimately handled the PPE.
Trainer drafted sill of sale, which OP edited.
Trainer seems to have done everything you would associate with selling a horse except putting an ad on the internet. OP did that because she felt the trainer wasn’t moving fast enough, rather than having a discussion with trainer.
All of this could have been cleared up if the OP sat down with the trainer before this all started and said “how will commissions work if I want to sell my horse? What will you do, what will I do, what will I pay? If I place the ad, can you accept less than 10% commission?”
OP chose not to talk to her trainer, just to be annoyed in the background and to place an ad. She should have talked to her trainer first if she expected to pay less commission because she placed the ad.
And not for nothing but how long could it take to throw an ad up? An hour, if I’m being crazy generous? Between the two showings, calling to arrange the sale, and attending the PPE the trainer probably spent a good day and a half cumulatively on this sale.
It’s lucky that the horse sold quickly to one of the first people to try it. Good for the OP. But had it not and the trainer had to show it 10000X before it sold, trainer still would have gotten 10%. That’s how commission works-- sometimes you come out ahead because a sale is easy, sometimes you don’t.
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if you are doing business, in someone else’s place of business, you owe them a commission. They allowed you to do it at their farm
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yes. But in Europe, costs are structured very differently. Most importantly, your health care system is set up to prevent medical bankruptcies. So to be a trainer, which is inherently a more dangerous professional than having a desk job, Europeans have more financial security knowing that a fall will not cause financial ruin. That’s not true here.
Were trainers here driving fancy cars and whatnot, I might see your point. But they’re not. Most are scraping by working 6 days a week with almost no vacation acting as animal wranglers and human therapists. The costs of running any kind of horse business are much higher here than in Europe, and if you injure yourself, it can be catastrophic. I would never begrudge anyone for trying to eke out a living in the horse world.
I’ve worked with trainers who want to make the majority of their money training and will charge $3000/month just for that and a smaller commission. I have also worked with trainers who run breakeven on training and grooming and make their money on commissions. As a client, I get to choose what works for me and what seems fair.
I think the OP needed to clarify this at the outset and we honestly have no idea what the trainer did behind the scenes to encourage the sale.
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Excuses. Let’s not start a discussion on the whole economic situation because this is 1)too broad and 2)off topic.
It’s because there is an oversupply of people who call themselves “trainers” without any qualification/actual training/approach etc (please read kenyarider’s comment above, with which I fully agree)! Fyi I can list you all the requirements to become just the lowest level of trainer C in Germany if you’d like? You need to have set standards, otherwise it becomes detrimental to the whole sport, to the clients, as well as the horses if you have unqualified trainers, who rely on commissions, because the whole commission thing is by its nature predatory! And this is valid everywhere in the world.
And the same goes for owning a horse. Horse owners in the US actually have more exposure and their risks are disproportionately higher than the said trainers. Furthermore, the situation is being burdened even more by these commissions.
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You do not know this about me, but I wholeheartedly agree that we should be certifying trainers and creating much higher standards for them. I’ve voiced that opinion extensively on here. I’m very familiar with the training standards of Germany, I have close friends there and in france and latin america, where things are a bit more like the US than Europe. Standardization of horse management, early riding education etc is sorely lacking here.
But I don’t agree that the problem is we have too many trainers per se. Most of them are already stretched quite thin time wise, so having fewer isn’t going to solve the problems of costs to amateurs. The more consolidated it gets, the higher pricing would theoretically be. I do not see an economic argument for how having fewer better trainers would lead to lower costs for amateurs. People need to make a living.
I do not agree that commissions are predatory personally. I work in finance and the rule is, the more illiquid an asset, the higher the commission. If you want to see predatory, look at the art market. Considering the work required to sell a live animal, and match it to another human being, I actually think 10% is fairly reasonable. Particularly when reputation is so important.
To me, the kick backs on top of kick backs and mark ups on horses bought by Americans in Europe is genuinely predatory and I would point to that as a bigger problem than commissions. And that happens everywhere.
I’m sorry I don’t know how to use the quote feature, b.ut I disagree with your last point.Risks for me as an owner are largely financially limited to the horse. But it’s my hobby. If Imy horse passes away and I have no money left to keep riding, my downside is capped. For trainers, many who have not any professional credentials beyond the horses, the risk is their livelihood. So yes, the financial safety nets that we do not have in the US but do exist in Europe to me are relevant. O
Last year, I bought a new horse. I paid a 10% commission. I did the math and that commission amounted to about 1% of my total costs. A rounding error compared to the costs of board, feed, vet, farrier, competitions and transport. It’s all expensive.
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Quite a few of us Americans are familiar with the German system of certification & (I personally) support the idea. But as the saying goes, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” What would you have us Americans do? Not buy or sell any horses on the pipe dream of a similar system being implemented here? Furthermore, as @greysfordays noted, the requirement that trainers be certified does little to counteract the amount of kickbacks & misrepresentation (some might say fraud) involved in European-to-US sales.
Holding a certification in one’s field doesn’t make one inherently honest…
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THIS is why people in the horse business continually get taken advantage of!
Pay the commission if you want to continue with this trainer.
Did you sign a boarding contract or training agreement? Many of them include the standard commission if horse is sold.
It may not feel like they did a ton, but if they took time out to be there for you, pay it forward and extend them the courtesy. If they object and say that they didn’t do enough to warrant it, thank them for being so honest and humble, then ask them what percentage would they be comfortable receiving?
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It’s in my boarding contract that commissions are paid on all horses bought and sold. Say what you want, but getting kicked out isn’t worth it to me.
I hosted my kid’s birthday party at a local restaurant. I sent the invitations. The restaurant made the food, let the kids run around the play area, and cleaned up afterwards. They came out to sing happy birthday and cut the cake. We occupied their space and their employees’ attention. And then they had the audacity to expect ME to pay full price for the FOOD?! They should give me a discount! I brought them all that business.
/sarcasm
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This thread is why I won’t board at a barn that has a bonafide “training program”. All horses bought and sold need to pay commission, contractually, even if the trainer didn’t do a blessed thing? Noooo thank you.
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Except that in this case it’s totally contrary to the facts here to say the trainer “didn’t do a blessed thing.” She literally did everything necessary to make the sale happen EXCEPT throwing an ad online (something that might not have even been necessary if the OP had been patient enough to let the trainer market the horse through word of mouth. We have no idea how long she waited before getting frustrated and putting the ad up. We do know that once there was a live potential buyer, the trainer did everything necessary to close the deal).
I agree with you that I would not want to pay commission on a transaction that was in no way sheparded by the trainer and was 100% outside the trainer’s barn but that’s NOT what happened here. OP happened to be a little more self reliant (and probably also a little less patient) than some client sellers but at the end of the day the trainer helped make this sale happen and so deserves her comission unless they contracted for some other arrangement before the trainer did the work (which they did not).
As an example, when I buy and sell show horses to be boarded with and in training with my trainer, I pay her a commission. I do some of the legwork myself because I’m capable (for example I tend to draft my own forms because I’m a lawyer and I often find horses to try through my own network. I also always set up my PPE because my relationship with my vet predates my relationship with my trainer and I do not use the trainer’s “usual” vet but trailer to someone else) but at the end of the day she helps me get the deal done so she deserves the commission.
I also own a farmette. When I bought a horse to live in my backyard, my trainer was uninvolved and I did not pay her a commission. She had nothing to do with the horse or the sale.
But the ones to be boarded with her and in her program? For which she helped with fundamental parts of the transaction? I have no problem paying a commission for those horses even if I did some work myself. It was my choice to do that work-- I could have sat back and not done it. Either way, I owe her a commission because she was fundamental to the deal getting done. So was OP’s trainer here. If OP wanted a different deal (pay a smaller commission in exchange for doing some work or pay by the hour for the trainer’s time) she could have certainly approached the trainer about that. She chose not to. So she pays the commission she agreed to pay in her boarding agreement. You don’t get to renegotiate a contract after the other party has performed.
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