What £5,000, £25,000 and £65,000 Actually Buy in a Young Showjumper

Why almost nobody publishes this

Ask a seller what a young showjumping prospect costs and you will usually get a range so wide it tells you nothing, or the phrase "price on application". Both are ways of finding out your budget before quoting you a number.

We publish a guide price on every horse we own, and this article explains what actually separates one band from another. The horses named below are in our collection as this is written, with the prices you can see on their pages. If a price has moved since, the page is right and this article is out of date.

The short version is that you are not buying a better horse as the number rises. You are buying more evidence, and evidence is the only thing that is genuinely scarce.

£5,000: an embryo

At the bottom of our range is a frozen embryo, currently guided at £5,000.

What you are buying is a pedigree and nothing else. No conformation to assess, no movement to watch, no temperament, no vetting. Ours is by Emerald van ''t Ruytershof out of a mare who competed to 1.40m and is herself out of a 1.60m Nations Cup mare, so the paper is genuinely strong. But paper is all there is.

This suits one kind of buyer: somebody who already breeds, has a recipient mare arranged, understands the failure rates and wants access to a cross they could not otherwise afford. It suits nobody else, and we would say so if you asked.

£15,000 to £20,000: a foal or yearling with real breeding

This is where most of our collection sits, and it is the band most misunderstood.

At £15,000 you can have a filly by Qlassic Bois Margot out of a Quidam de Revel mare. At £20,000 you can have a Comme il Faut mare, or a filly by Aganix du Seigneur Z, or a three year old gelding carrying Cornet Obolensky as his grandsire.

What you are buying here is a well made young horse from proven blood, at an age where nobody can honestly tell you what it will jump. That uncertainty is not a defect being hidden from you. It is the reason the price is what it is. A four year old with the same pedigree and a season of results behind it costs several times as much, and the difference between those two numbers is precisely the risk you are taking on.

The buyers who do best in this band are the ones who intend to produce the horse themselves, or who are buying a filly with half an eye on breeding from her later. The ones who do worst are the ones who wanted a proven horse and bought a young one because it was affordable.

£25,000 to £30,000: the band where the horse is old enough to show you something

Three of our horses sit at £25,000 and two at £30,000, and the jump from the band below is not really about pedigree. Plenty of £20,000 horses have pedigrees just as good.

It is about what can now be observed. A two or three year old has grown into its frame. You can see how it moves, how it uses itself, what its temperament is under handling, whether the shoulder and the hind leg turned out the way the breeding suggested they might. Some have been loose jumped.

It is also the band where the damline starts to do heavy lifting. One of our fillies at £30,000 is out of a mare who has already produced a horse jumping 1.70m. That is not a promise about the filly. It is evidence that the combination has worked before, which is a different and better thing than a fashionable sire.

If you have £25,000 and you are looking at horses at half that, the honest question to ask is what the cheaper horse has that you can actually verify.

£65,000: a proven producer, or a horse with a record

Our highest current guide is a 2025 mare by Chacco-Blue out of a Clarimo mare at £65,000.

Above £30,000 you are usually paying for one of two things: a competition record you can look up, or a mare whose value is what she will breed rather than what she will jump. Both are forms of certainty, and certainty is what the money buys.

This is also the band where our own horses start being ones we are reluctant to sell, which is worth being straight about. Several horses on our site have full pages and no price at all. They are not for sale, they are part of the breeding programme, and if you make a serious approach we will listen without any expectation that a deal follows.

The band nobody should buy in

We regularly receive enquiries at £8,000 to £10,000 for horses guided considerably higher.

There is no criticism in that. It is a real budget and there are real horses at it. But it is worth being clear about what that budget buys in this market, because a young horse with genuinely proven blood, correct conformation and honest handling is not usually one of them. What it buys is a horse where one of those three things has been compromised, and the buyer usually finds out which one about eighteen months later.

If your budget is there, our honest advice is to buy an older horse with a record rather than a young one with a pedigree. You will get far more certainty for your money, and certainty is what matters at that level.

What the price does not tell you

Two things worth knowing, because they cut across every band.

A guide price is not a fixed price. It is what we think the horse is worth, published so that you can decide whether to spend an afternoon on it. We would rather have a conversation than a haggle, and a serious buyer who explains their position gets a serious answer.

A cheaper horse is not a worse horse. Our best documented foal, the only one with a clinical vetting and a full written assessment, is one of the cheapest things we own. She is priced where she is because of her age, not her quality. Sometimes the market is simply slower than the horse.

How to use this

Work out which band your certainty requirement puts you in, rather than which band your budget stretches to. Those are different questions and the second one gets people into trouble.

Then look at what is currently available, read the mares behind the young horses, and if you want the reasoning behind a particular price, ask us. We will tell you what the horse has and what it has not, including the parts that do not help us.