keenelandmarketing5
Though most Lexington residents visit Keeneland in April and October during the track’s race meet, the grounds are teeming through the first weeks of November during the biggest Thoroughbred breeding stock sale of its kind in the world.
Keeneland November is primarily focused on broodmares and broodmare prospects (mares that have recently retired from the track but have not yet been bred), but also includes weanlings, a few 2-year-olds, yearlings and stallions. This year’s sale cataloged 3,958 horses, which cycled through the track’s 40-odd barns over 11 days.
In longer sales like this one, Keeneland’s sales team organizes the entries into several catalog books grouped by expected price range, from largest to smallest — a monumental task that requires careful scrutiny of each entry’s pedigree and physique. This year’s sale proved, however, that session-topping prices don’t always go in descending order, as the last day’s session saw a six-figure price amid a four-figure average and median.
At its completion, the numbers painted a positive picture, with the gross sales, average and median prices up, and the RNA percentage (horses whose reserve prices were not attained in the ring) was down — all positive indications for the industry as it continues to deal with the contraction that followed the economic crash of 2008.
Since then, most buyers say the numbers have begun to settle, and the market is more selective than it used to be, with a reduced willingness to take chances on unproven or physically flawed horses. The more desirable sale entries, however, are still finding six- and seven-figure price tags. The sale of 2011 Horse of the Year Havre de Grace for $10 million at the Fasig-Tipton November sale the night before Keeneland’s opening session proved that good horses can still bring good prices.
Before all the barrage of statistics and family trees run together, though, the Keeneland sale is more than an economic temperature-taking; it’s the last major Thoroughbred event of the calendar year. As such, it is filled with scenes and stories that play their own role in the overall picture.
This year, instead of focusing solely on the numbers, we got curious about the people and horses behind the statistics, so toward the end of the sale, Business Lexington brought its readers mini-features with each of the last week’s rundowns of the prices.
We visited with head auctioneer Ryan Mahan, who is one of many voices heard stirring the price pot throughout the grounds, as well as Cordell Anderson, one of the ever-patient horse handlers inside the sale ring. We also took a look at the selling decisions that go into sending a stallion prospect to public auction, as well as the logistics of managing a breeding horse in a barn full of mares. Several consignors selling hundreds of horses explained how they manage a large team scattered over several barns and how they market their high-priced entries to buyers before and during the auction. At the sale’s conclusion, Keeneland had seen a number of international customers, who bought at both high and middle pricepoints.
Marketing to a global audience
These days, shaking a buyer’s hand at the sale grounds is no longer the only thing that goes into selling a horse.
Consignors have used print advertising in trade publications to market their upcoming group of sales entries for years, and it’s common to see brochures for up-and-coming stallions outside a barn if their progeny are on the way to the sales ring. Several consignors had flat-screen televisions set up at their tables also, replaying racing highlights from a sales entry or relative.
For those hoping to sell a horse for seven figures, however, a little work in advance may be needed. Several consignors of the top-selling horses at Keeneland November started advertising them to a selected group of potential buyers with mailers and information packets in the days and weeks leading up to the sale.
On site, most try to put their touch of brand recognition on the standard cinderblock barns with signs and employee uniforms.
Taylor Made, in particular, tends to go all out in branding its barns. In addition to its distinctive maroon awnings and trademark button-up shirts and ties for employees, the exterior barn walls hold framed reminder posters of the company’s successful sales graduates. At this year’s Keeneland November sale, nearly life-size posters of the farm’s star stallion, Unbridled’s Song, as well as newcomer Eskendereya, hung on the walls of the barns’ breezeways. Each featured their conformation photos, giving out-of-town buyers an opportunity to assess their physique on a larger scale than what they would find in an advertisement. Both stallions have offspring in the consignment.
No doubt the biggest marketing push of the sale was for Hip 96, 2011 Kentucky Oaks (G1) winner Plum Pretty, who brought $4.2 million in the sale’s first session to Whisper Hill Farm’s Mandy Pope. The filly not only got her own mini biographical video, but she had her own day at Keeneland. “Plum Pretty Day” was held Oct. 14 as a promotion for her upcoming sale and a tribute to the race mare for her fans. Keeneland visitors wearing purple were granted free entry and allowed to enter a contest to meet the filly and take her halter home.
One of the newest marketing tools from the agency was first evident at Fasig Tipton’s November sale, where flyers were available for select mares in Japanese.
“We just started that recently on a lot of these mares that we thought the Japanese would be interested in,” said Frank Taylor, vice president of boarding operations at Taylor Made. “We send a lot of mail-outs to the individual Japanese buyers.”
When creating print materials, whether on site or mailed ahead, Taylor said it’s important to consider the client. Buyers from Japan tend to pay the most for mares that are just coming off the track with glitzy race records, more so than older mares with historically lauded bloodlines. Most recently, Katsumi Yoshida’s Northern Farm purchased Grade I winner Zazu from the sale’s first session for $2.1 million.
“You just have to look at what their history of buying is and advertise toward what their needs are,” he said.
When asked whether the efforts were working, Taylor chuckled. “They’re buying ‘em,” he said. “I know that.”
Handling expensive horses
The Keeneland sales ring, with its bright lights and auctioneers’ hum, can be intimidating place for anybody, and the horses are no exception.
Somehow, no matter how many frightened hooves and impatient teeth come their way, Cordell Anderson and the other ring handlers manage to keep the horses inside the ropes and relaxed enough to pose for the online-streaming cameras, all without so much as wrinkling their trademark green coats.
“You get some tough ones in there sometimes,” said Anderson, who has been working in the ring for 23 years. “I don’t find it hard. I get some tough ones that get kind of jumpy.”
He has his techniques for getting a horse’s attention, though they may not be obvious to the untrained eye. While he will usually circle a horse counter-clockwise in the ring to show it off to buyers, he changes direction with a panicked entry. If a horse is overwhelmed by the environment, he’ll direct it to the side of the auctioneers’ stand so it can look around for a few seconds. He keeps a light hold on the shank, directing the horse’s body with a quiet push against the shoulder. Well-behaved entries get a reassuring pat after the hammer falls.
“Some of the mares are really bad. They don’t want anything to do with this … they don’t come off the farm a lot,” he said. “The babies, they’re young, but the mares have been to the races, so they get a little tough … they want to be out there at the farm.”
One such mare dances into the ring during a weekend session, eyes bulging as she absorbs the scene. The mare settles beneath the auctioneers’ stand, but when she hears the tap of the hammer just above her head, she becomes unhinged. She wheels her hindquarters and half-rears, turning her head and offering to dance into the front row of seats outside the ring. The audience goes silent and tense as auctioneer Ryan Mahan stops his warble, but Anderson and his partner in the ring remain calm. They give the mare a moment to compose herself before delicately helping her out the back door.
“I’ve had them rear up,” Anderson said. “I’ve had one weanling, the one side of him got down in the bushes [which surround the ring], but he got back up.”
Surprisingly enough, he said the stallion prospects are relatively easy to handle, because they are usually fresh off the track, where they’ve been worked with daily.
Ring handlers typically work in pairs, which keeps the flow of horses going in and out the doors on either side of the auctioneers’ stand and also provides them some help if a nervous horse gets spooky coming in or out.
Like many others who keep the sales running, Anderson travels the auction circuit through the United States and Canada during much of the year and picks up work at the racetrack with trainer Kenny McPeek as needed. Showing horses in the ring is his preferred job, however.
“I love the racetrack,” he said. “But I love the sales, I guess, the most.”
The man behind the voice: Numbers holding steady
Ryan Mahan’s voice is the loudest one at Keeneland, and he isn’t even shouting.
Mahan is just one of a team of auctioneers responsible for the fast-talking buzz projected through the sales pavilion and grounds for most of each sales day. As the senior auctioneer, Mahan has been the head of the team of voices driving the numbers for 11 years. After starting off at Keeneland as a bid spotter in 1977, he became the chief announcer for several years, and was then promoted to auctioneer in the 1980s. Mahan said that he started out in auctioneers’ school just out of college.
“They kind of get you in front of people, talking fast … You just feel like an idiot, getting up there and talking fast, but everybody’s an idiot,” he said. “The things that we’re saying are intelligible words. For example, ‘I have 10, anybody give 12, anybody give 12, anybody give 12?’ and we pick up the pace for obvious reasons of momentum.”
From there, he got his professional start auctioning farm equipment and cattle before he transitioned to Thoroughbreds. Many of the other auctioneers (who rotate throughout each session) sell cars when they aren’t on Keeneland’s auctioneers’ stand. Mahan travels with the sales circuit most of the year and is auctioneer for Barretts Equine Limited in California and the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company in Florida.
When he’s not traveling to sell horses, Mahan is also part of the inspection team for Keeneland’s September yearling sale, examining horses on the farm to check out the entries’ physique.
Contrary to popular belief, he said, auctioneers don’t commonly get sore throats after a day of yodeling into the microphone. In fact, much like a musical instrument, the pitch of his voice gets clearer the longer he uses it.
“So much of what we do is show business, really,” he said. “To do what we do, you have to have a little baloney to you. I would say most of us were probably the class clown at one point.”
That sense of performance is also what keeps members of the auctioneering team from freezing up on the microphone. They also study the catalog ahead of time to gain a sense of what is most marketable about each entry. Each auctioneer also has his own style of creating energy and attracting the audience’s attention, usually crafted from the influence of his mentors over the years. Mahan said that the way he auctions is also heavily influenced by who the bidders and underbidders are, and knowing what drives them to up their prices.
“The style is very personal, but I think it develops over years, and I think it develops because of relationships,” he said.