PTIC heifers are the largest single category of commercial cattle offered on AuctionsPlus. In this previous article, the AuctionsPlus Market Insights team highlighted the seasonality of PTIC heifer listings and outlined our expectations for a surge of listings in early 2023. In such a large category, it can be hard to make your offering standout. Here are some tips to give you the best chance to succeed.
Making your lot move with video
Videos are a crucial part of any assessment as they allow potential buyers to view and assess how the heifers walk and interact in a mob. This gives them reassurance that they are functional breeders with good temperament and are going to be easy to handle and productive for years to come.
Analysis into the prices received for PTIC heifer lots from 2020 to 2022 with zero, one or two videos has revealed the premiums on offer. An average premium of $142 per head was achieved by including one video in your assessment. This varied between $94, $158 and $175 per head in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively (Figure 1). Including a second video added a further premium of $87 and $33 per head in 2020 and 2021. Interestingly, two videos created a discount of $112 compared to one video in 2022, while still earning a $62 premium over lots with zero videos.
Figure 1: Average PTIC heifer prices by number of videos 2020-2022. Source: AuctionsPlus.
Improving your credentials with certificates and EBVs
One of the unique features of AuctionsPlus is the ability to include attachments with an assessment. These attachments can include a range of different documents and for PTIC heifers, often involve veterinary certificates and joining bull details. These provide greater assurance with detailed and comprehensive information for bidders to consider when making purchasing decisions.
Veterinary certificates provide an extra level of guarantee of the pregnancy status of the heifers and time frame of the joining period. Joining bull details such as pedigree and EBVs allow bidders to better understand how the future progeny of the heifers are expected to perform. It also gives more accurate indication of the calving ease potential of the joining bulls. The classification of ‘heifer bulls’ or ‘low-birthweight (LBW) bulls’ is a subjective label, whereas calving ease and birthweight EBVs are objective and easily compared between bulls.
An average premium of $62 per head was achieved by including one attachment on a PTIC heifer assessment. This varied between $34, $64 and $90 per head in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively (Figure 2). Including a second attachment generated a further premium of $109 per head on average, varying between $62, $57 and $207 per head in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively.
The data does not distinguish between different types of attachments, but it is likely that multiple attachments are details of multiple joining bulls as generally only one veterinary certificate is necessary per lot. An average of 78% of PTIC heifer lots from 2020 to 2022 did not include any attachments, posing a significant opportunity for those vendors to better market their PTIC heifers.
Figure 2: Average PTIC heifer prices by number of attachments 2020-2022. Source: AuctionsPlus.
If you are looking to differentiate your PTIC heifers from the rest and want to get the best return on investment for your bulls, including the joining bulls EBVs and a veterinary certificate on the assessment of your PTIC heifers is a good option.
Additionally, AuctionsPlus has embarked on an uplift of our User Agreement to further enhance the transparency and confidence when PTIC lots are offered. This includes new requirements to market PTIC females as of 1 March 2023, more information is available in our Help Centre here.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s
