Shanthi,
Do you think that you could change the idea of Auction Consignment Fees so that, instead of an owner having to pay a flat $5k for each horse consigned, they would pay a Fee based on the number of horses they consigned? This would help some of the smaller stables. With the current set up, if a Stable hopes to make any money on horses consigned to an Auction, they have to put in a Reserve of $5k on each horse. Usually Stables aren’t going to consign their best runners so there will probably be horses in the Auction that other stables will not want to spend that much money on. On top of the consignment fee, selling stables will still have to pay Taxes (when taxes are brought back).
As an example, an Auction Fee of $5k for 1-5 horses, $10k for 6-10 horses, $15k for 11-15, etc. You could set it up so that if the Auctioning Stable adds more horses to the Auction after it has been initially set up, the “count” would start from scratch, e.g. I set up an Auction today with 14 horses and pay the $15k fee. In two days, I decide to add another horse to the Auction, the code wouldn’t treat it as the 15th horse in the Auction and not charge an additional fee, but would treat it as 1-5 entered and charge me $5k.
Perhaps you could do this for private Auctions only and leave the FF Auctions as normal, i.e $5k for each horse consigned.
I suspect that the reason that there are over 200 horses for sale is because people want to sell off some of their excess horses but don’t want to have to pay $5k for each horse they consign to an Auction.
