Harness: Hoofbid makes a splash in first auction session

There is a new shooter in the online auction business for horses and Hoofbid.com certainly started with a bang. Launched in early May as a website and state-of-the-art app, Hoofbid provides an easy and quick outlet for sellers to find interested buyers of racehorses, broodmares, stallion shares and more.

While Hoofbid allows for regular listings, perhaps the most exciting feature involves the Sunday night auctions. Every five minutes, starting at 7 PM on Sunday, a number of horses are sold in rapid-fire succession via 10-minute auctions, with the bidding resetting to one minute each time a buyer ups the ante with a minute or less remaining.

"You can watch the bids coming in against each other via the bidder numbers and follow the action," said co-owner Adriano Sorella, who is also handling the marketing for the new venture. "I was getting calls from all over the place today from people who told me they were just watching it and mesmerized by the bidding. We figured it would be a good concept, but you don’t know until you put it out there."

A total of 14 horses were placed in the site’s first-ever Sunday auction on May 17, which lasted just over 60 minutes. Four of the horses were part of a "choose your horse" option where the winning bidder could pick between two horses. Half of the 12 auctions resulted in sales, some to new owners and others as buybacks. Four horses had reserve bids that weren't met, while every horse offered received a bid except one.

"Under the circumstances it did very well. There are only so many horses that people want to sell right now. They want to hold onto their horses until they start racing so they can get past performance lines on them," said Sorella. "We had a lot of people registering, many of them 30 minutes before the auction started.

"Once racing starts, people will want to buy horses and get rid of ones that aren't good for their stable. We figure there will be a lot of traction."

Entries for the weekly auction on Sunday open on Monday and close 10PM on Thursday. The horses available are visible on Friday afternoon via the app or online but bidding doesn’t start until Sunday evening. This gives potential buyers a chance to view past performances, pedigrees or replays through the platform.

Hoofbid was the brainchild of co-founders Frank Tatulli and Jeff Davis. The pair and Sorella were independently working on similar projects. "Jeff contacted me last year and said he was working on a project and wanted to run some ideas by me," said Sorella. "When he told me what it was, I stopped him on his first sentence and said that I was working on the same thing. I own Horsebids.com and we’re building that out."

The trio decided to share information and work in partnership on the project. Sorella scrapped horsebids.com for the current url and Hoofbid.com was created.

According to Davis, Hoofbid ranked #3 in the United States and #5 in Canada for the "shopping category" in the Apple App Store last week. "We had over 450 users in the app during the auctions," said Davis.

The market leader right now in online Standardbred horse sales is ongait.com, but Sorella said they aren't necessarily going head-to-head with them. "We are not here to steal ongait’s business because we have a different way of doing things," said Sorella. "This simply may give people another way of getting rid of a horse very fast if they want to."

While the app's design is certainly sleek and easy to navigate, Sorella said they won’t be resting now that Hoofbid is launched. "This doesn’t just stop here. There will be a lot of other features coming to it," said Sorella.