Is Preloved the best place to look for horses for sale??

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soloequestrian

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Not looking all that seriously at the moment, but having checked a few sites the only one that seems to have lots of horses for sale is Preloved. And it's rubbish to search because it's not horse-specific. What am I missing? I'd be after either a project or an older horse that has dressage skills but needs care (i.e. not much money to spend but a good home offered!).
 
Personally I like to look at people advertising on facebook (i.e. friend of a friend). Obviously its not allowed on facebook anymore but there are always plenty of local posts about. I'd much rather buy from someone who I vaguely knew or a friend did, but thats just me being overly cautious! Hope you find a nice horse.
 
It's because preloved is free so there are lots of adverts, you can put what ever you want in the search box and there are filters to narrow things down, with a lot of the better sites like horse quest or horse and hound they charge and I think people will be putting off advertising at the moment as no one can view.
 
I have bought a couple form Pre-loved over the yers, I just put my requirements (keywords) into the search function. I also onlyh look at ads up to 50 miles away from home, usually.
 
When I was looking for my first horse I looked up done deal ( I am from Ireland) I saw my horses add I tried her and I bought her She turned out to the perfect horse. I would recommend Facebook . Ideally the best way of getting a horse is though word of mouth but that really hard to do. Just be careful there a doggie people . I wish you the best of luck finding your new horse.
 
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horsequest, horsemart, pets4homes, the horse exchange, dragon driving(with your eyes very wide open) ,depends what you are looking for but horsequest seems to have better quality horses and is easy to search....i think people are holding off advertising while we are on lockdown..
 
I've tried most of those and it would make sense that lockdown is affecting the numbers, but Preloved has hundreds of horses from free/a few hundred pounds up to £20k. Is it becoming the go-to advertising place? You can advertise on Gumtree for free too but there are very few horses on there now.
 
i have just had a quick look on preloved as am looking for 15 to 15.2 for a friend. i got to page 4 of the most recent ones to be added and saw nothing that would suit, mainly seem to be 14.2 and under,youngsters , or ex racehorses.. will keep popping back just in case..but have found a few that will suit her on horsequest, just waiting for lockdown to ease the restrictions...
 
I like preloved, but then ive usually been looking for a good value youngster local to me.
Once viewings are possible again then I think horse quest will probably pick back up. People don't tend to pay for advertising unless they think they are going to get a fairly quick response from it.
 
Depending where you live I like NFED best (mainly Hants/South West), Horsequest and Dragon Driving though most of the nicest ones on DD seem to be midlands or North.
 
There's a comparatively new website been launched with potential and proven hunters advertised. That's getting a number of new ads recently.
I think people are starting to make plans for post lockdown.
 
I use Facebook, Preloved, Horse Quest and Horse Mart. I seem to find most on Preloved but then I check the names out and do lots of googling before I respond and usually that rules most of them out.
Quite a few have come on the Facebook groups over the last couple of days.
 
I found this the last time I was looking for a horse (nearly four years ago now), and Preloved is where I ended up finding her.
 
Thanks, this is interesting. I'm very far north - Yorkshire would probably be the furthest south I'd want to travel to look at anything, so concentration of horses is much lower than the more southern areas. I'm interested in the research aspect - is it names of horses or sellers that people look at? I've not bought from a totally unknown source for many years so may be a bit naïve in that respect.....
 
soloequestrian said:
Thanks, this is interesting. I'm very far north - Yorkshire would probably be the furthest south I'd want to travel to look at anything, so concentration of horses is much lower than the more southern areas. I'm interested in the research aspect - is it names of horses or sellers that people look at? I've not bought from a totally unknown source for many years so may be a bit naïve in that respect.....
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Im looking at the moment and what I do which seems to rule a lot out is - look at horses affiliated record, rarely has thrown up any major red flags. But I am a bit of a stalker on social media, you can normally find what the horse has been up to most recently on their owners pages. But what their friends and family comment can be very telling! The latest horse I enquired about turned out to be a known rearer after seeing numerous hair raising hunting photos!
If you can’t find the owner via their name, you can reverse image search photos of the horse and see where else they have been posted. God I sound like a psychopath.
 
RHM said:
Im looking at the moment and what I do which seems to rule a lot out is - look at horses affiliated record, rarely has thrown up any major red flags. But I am a bit of a stalker on social media, you can normally find what the horse has been up to most recently on their owners pages. But what their friends and family comment can be very telling! The latest horse I enquired about turned out to be a known rearer after seeing numerous hair raising hunting photos!
If you can’t find the owner via their name, you can reverse image search photos of the horse and see where else they have been posted. God I sound like a psychopath.
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No careful.
 
No, that all sounds quite sensible. Actually I did do some of it with one horse too - an older dressage horse that FB comments suggested had been quite poorly but nothing mentioned in the ad! How does a reverse image search work?!
 
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We found one on Preloved (not totally honest ad as we later discovered), one on Horsemart (everything they said and more) and one on FB (completely honest ad).
 
soloequestrian said:
No, that all sounds quite sensible. Actually I did do some of it with one horse too - an older dressage horse that FB comments suggested had been quite poorly but nothing mentioned in the ad! How does a reverse image search work?!
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It’s really easy, open google on a desktop/laptop, click the little camera icon. You can then upload a image from your computer or just drag and drop the image from another open tab. Your search results show other websites which the image has been posted/published. :)
 
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