I expected this gecko to sell for $12,000 to $13,000. It sold for $20,000, and one buyer told me I should have kept going.
Video · 13 min watchWritten by Brian
I recently sold an axanthic crested gecko for $20,000, and a lot of people have asked me how a sale like that happens, why a gecko is worth that much, and who buys one.
Why this gecko
He is a particularly nice axanthic: very dark, with clean white highlights. He is also a male, and that matters. In high-end designer morph breeding, males are always worth the most. A female can only lay a set number of eggs a year, so even the best female might parent 8 to 12 offspring a year. A top male can be bred to 6, 8 or 10 females and father around 80 offspring a year.
How the sale came about
Geckos like this only sell a couple of times a year. I first offered him privately to good past customers at around $12,000. They pushed back: someone else had recently sold a similar animal for about half that, so they said the market had dropped and I should match it. I knew the circumstances of that sale. It was an exception, not the rule, and I did not agree.
So I took a gamble. Instead of selling to my usual high-end buyers, I let the worldwide market set the price. I listed him for best offer, open until Friday. My website needs a price on every listing, so I put $20,000 as a placeholder, high enough that I assumed no one would click buy.
I expected him to land at $12,000 to $13,000 and hoped for $15,000. At $12,000 to $13,000 I still had five or six interested buyers. At $15,000 there were three or four. At $17,000, with two days left, one buyer asked to stop bidding and buy him outright at the listed $20,000. I agreed.
Afterwards another customer told me he would have gone past $20,000. The auction did what I wanted: it set a market value, instead of someone else telling me where the market was.
Who buys a $20,000 gecko
A gecko like this is a breeding investment, bought by serious breeders with business goals. It is not for someone with one pet in a nice tank and a couple of hundred dollars in the whole setup, and there is nothing wrong with keeping pets or breeding pet-quality geckos. This is a different thing.
Think of it like any business buying vehicles, a bigger warehouse or equipment to raise output. A better breeder produces higher-value offspring, and those sales justify the cost. Few people want to spend this much, but geckos at this level are very rare. That is supply and demand.
In context
$20,000 is not even the highest price for a crested gecko. I sold a lily white axanthic for $23,000 the year before. Patient Zero, the piebald crested gecko that lives at Pangea Reptiles, sold for $35,000. His morph turned out not to be reproducible, which makes him a poor breeding investment, though I suspect the advertising has paid off for Pangea. Unproven morphs are tricky. Proven ones get expensive: several snake morphs have sold for over $100,000, and the first scaleless ball python sold for $150,000. In high-end reptile breeding, a $20,000 crested gecko is not that big a deal.