Puppy Market News: Puppy Glut Bites Most Breeders Hard

Hello, it’s Meg here from Marketing for Breeders with an update on what’s happening with the puppy market at the moment.  I don’t have to tell any of you who are currently active breeders that things are a bit grim as far as puppy demand goes.

Current Trends in Puppy Demand

Australian Puppy Market

So the first thing I would like to share with you are current trends in the demand for puppies. I’m just looking at Google Trends for Western Australia, which is where I live. In the last 2 years the demand for puppies in general  has gone from around about 94 ish down to about 32. So the active number of searches for puppies for sale on Google at the moment has dropped by two thirds in Western Australia, which is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 32 years.

If we look at Australia as a whole demand is similarly severely depressed: 88 down to about 27, again a drop of around 67%.

Puppy Glut in the United States

And what about the United States?  While it might be feeling pretty horrific there at the moment for you guys, the drop in demand for puppies is not as bad as it is here in Australia, falling by about half over the past two years.

Other Countries?

Wherever you are in the world you can check out the trends in your location for yourself just by Googling Google Trends, then put your search term “puppies for sale” in there under “explore” and set your location.

Impact of Puppy Slump on Waiting Lists

The next thing I looked at was the number of people who have joined my wait list in the last couple of years to see how that was tracking, as well as some recent results for breeders who are enrolled in my program.  I would like to share these with you just so you can see the impact that good marketing and the Elite Breeder Formula method can have on the results that you can get as a breeder.

My Results

Okay, so here is the number of actual waiting list deposits [which are $500] that I’ve had into my account in the last two years. There’s 127 of them all up. I sell as part of a group for my breeder “associates” in Western Australia who help me supply enough puppies for this level of demand.  Of course, if it was just you and you didn’t have this many puppies or you had access to a larger buying population you wouldn’t need to secure so many committed buyers.  The state I live in – Western Australia – is big in size, but there’s only 2.7 million people in the whole state.  Our capital city Perth is the most isolated city in the world, and is home to about 90% of the state’s population. That makes it a pretty interesting test case. And about 95% of the people who buy off me live in Western Australia and I’ve managed to, in the last two years, get 127 people join my list from that relatively small population.

The number of inquiries have definitely dropped a lot lately and I was starting to panic a little bit about getting enough buyers on the waiting list because my breeder associates rely on me to get their puppies sold and find good owners for them at good prices.  [We are more expensive than everybody else on the market because we value add our pups.] So I decided to do an analysis of those deposits that you saw over the past 2 years and it was very interesting. I’ll just share this with you now.

The number of people paying to join the list has gone up and down but overall has held remarkably steady.

63 people joined the list in the last 12 months and there were 63 people join the list in the previous 12 months. So it’s going okay, really nothing to really be worried about.

What I’ve been experiencing is that while there’s a lot fewer inquiries, those I am getting are more likely to actually join the waiting list.

This underlines this important point:

There is a crowded market with too many breeders, and way too many puppies at the moment, but it’s only crowded at the bottom and the middle sectors of the market. 

The top of the market is not that crowded at all!

How is the Puppy Market Affecting for Elite Breeders?

And let me prove it to you with some results that we’ve had from some of our students in our group.

One of them is Veronica.

As of the 1st of June Veronica had sold 19 older puppies in just a few weeks from joining the program, which is pretty amazing.  And it’s all about marketing and what you do with your pups.

Another is Shawn.

As of June 8th this year Shawn has attracted 43 new people onto her waiting list since joining our program, which is fantastic.

And here is Michelle.

Michelle is very creative and made a kissing booth for puppies, not to sell them but to raise funds for a charity. The interesting thing about this post of 18 July this year is her comment that she has placed 36 puppies in the US at three and a half grand each since March this year. $3,500 USD each for Bernese Mountain dog puppies is very, very cool.

The Puppy Glut – What Are Your Options?

Some of you are surely asking yourself, is it even worth breeding at all if you’re going to end up with loads of puppies left over and struggle to even give those puppies away.

Honestly, if you are not breeding to a secure, committed waiting list, you must have nerves of steel to continue in the market the way it is now, especially if you haven’t paid attention to the business side of your breeding, the marketing, customer service, and the quality assurance, which is what we teach in our Elite Breeder Formula program.

If you would like to learn for free about how that works grab a spot on the Free Marketing for Breeders masterclass.

[And if you would like customized personal help afterwards, then I’d be really happy to talk to anybody for free, an give a whole hour of my time just for you.

When you are ready to change your results forever, get to watch the free masterclass and I look forward to speaking to some of you later.]