Brandon and Diannah Perry are offering their first Thoroughbred yearling consignment in the name of their Kentucky-based Paragon Farms at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select sale, which starts its two-night run Aug. 4 in New York. But they aren’t newcomers to the horse auction business. They’ve sold Quarter Horses in the past, and they’re also partners in Vision Sales (along with John and Jill Stephens), which buys Thoroughbred yearlings and resells them as 2-year-olds.
“It’s exciting; it really is,” Brandon Perry said. “This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and the timing seemed right. We do all the work on our farm, from the matings; to foaling the mares out, to raising the young horses, to prepping them for the sales. Then, for the last three or four days we own them, they get handed off to someone else to be sold. It’s kind of like the old saying, you know your own horse better than anyone else. Our intent is to sell our own horses. We’re not going to seek out other horses to consign.”
Paragon’s Saratoga yearlings are a Street Cry– Virtus colt and a Forestry– Country Melody filly. Paragon will have five horses in its Keeneland September yearling sale consignment. Another consignment is planned for the Keeneland November breeding stock sale.
“Next year, Vision Sales is going to expand a little bit,” Brandon Perry said. “We’re going to buy some weanlings to resell as yearlings and also some broodmare prospects to sell, so Paragon will be selling horses as agent for Vision Sales.”
There are “13 to 14” Paragon-owned mares, according to Perry, and Paragon will have 12 of their yearlings to sell in 2009.
Because the Perrys had sold Quarter Horses at auction, “we had a lot of the things like our tack trunks from 10 years ago,” Brandon Perry said. “The trunks just needed changing so they said Paragon. We also had a lot of other stuff. We hired some good people to run our consignment because we are going to be looking at yearlings at Saratoga to buy (for the Vision Sales pinhooking venture). We can’t physically be at our barn all the time, so we need someone to manage our consignment the way we would do it.”
