KEY POINTS:
Former equestrian Olympian Blyth Tait admits he felt nervous when he led his standout filly into the Karaka ring yesterday.
The only other two yearlings from his Chesterfield Stud premier draft - a Show A Heart filly and a One Cool Cat colt - joined a growing list
of passed-in lots at the sale.
But after interest stalled around $130,000 for his Zabeel-Chablis yearling, bids kickstarted into life with a flurry of $10,000 leaps before two Auckland buyers settled on $175,000.
"I thought that was fair - she was on the market for $150,000," said a relieved Tait back at the barn.
"I'm a lot happier now."
While buyers were celebrating their best playing field for years at Karaka, the flipside impacts on vendors like Tait's boutique Karaka operation.
They can heed Sir Patrick Hogan's pre-sale plea to be realistic and meet the depressed market.
But as Tait points out, they still have to absorb the shortfall in subsequent months.
"We're clearly realistic about the current financial situation and understand the market, but we haven't got a lot to play with when dealing with smaller numbers," he said.
"We're not disappointed with the results; it's part of business. But I do think it affects smaller vendors more than the larger ones. We don't have the same margin for recovery.
"But we've had some good sales up to this point; we've just got to absorb this. We've got plenty of good horses coming up in the next two sales [the Select and Festival]."
Toward the end of yesterday's final session, the premier average had dipped from last year's record $199,265, to nearer $150,000, with a fall in the clearance rate over the same period from 83 per cent to about 70 per cent.
But Petrea Vela, New Zealand Bloodstock's managing director of sales and marketing, was pleased with the overall result.
"We still had strong competition for the top lots but buyers have been select and they can afford to be in this sort of market," she said.
"We were predicting a 25-30 per cent drop and that's proven to be the case.
"The New Zealand industry has had strong growth in the last few years. We were due a correction and that's what we've seen."
One studmaster said that most vendors expected a fall but many who chose to sell at the Premier sale rather than take their horse back home were taking a loss once stallion service fees and the cost of preparing yearlings were taken into account.
- NZPA