Missoula News | New West Network

Hunting on the Range

Amenity Ranch Boom Spreads East

By Hal Herring, 1-15-07

	Wide open spaces inherent to central Montana ranches like this one are attracting a new wave of buyers looking for "amenity ranches" outside the scope of the West's traditional hot spots. Photo by Marshall Hibbard.

The term “amenity ranch” is a part of the modern vocabulary of the West, and the mind’s eye is replete with a thousand slick ads in a hundred different magazines: a huge log mansion, picture windows warmly alight, a trout river flowing majestically with towering snow-covered peaks beyond. The fields are lush and green. The scenes of western agriculture as we have come to know it are absent from the vision.

But as land prices in the most scenic and still accessible parts of the west reach astronomical levels, a new breed of amenity ranch buyers is emerging, casting about for land far from the luxury hotspots like Jackson Hole or Big Sky.

This new breed has been priced out of those places, and many of them don’t seem to care about that. They don’t need ski-town ambiance, wealthy neighbors, or even rushing streams full of native trout. They just want the commodity that is perhaps the fastest disappearing one on earth -- big private spaces, clean air, a place to hunt big game and upland birds and waterfowl.

Once-forgotten farm and ranch land in the plains of the West is teeming with these amenities and often sells for a price that -- for now -- pales in comparison to what's being sold in the Jackson Holes and Big Skies of the region. Over the past decade, many of these properties have been made even more desirable by enrollment in the federal Conservation Reserve Program or the Wetlands Reserve Program or the availability of Conservation Easements, or a combination of all three -- all of which encourage more wildlife habitat while providing either per-acre payments or tax breaks for buyers.

This new market is driving up land prices from eastern Oregon to Kansas and Nebraska, transforming some of the most marginal operations on the prairies into valuable real estate. Even land in once-forgotten places like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, or the empty country of the Terry Badlands of Montana, is no longer affordable enough to “pencil out” -- produce enough profit to pay for itself -- by producing cattle or crops.

The trend has caused the sporting goods collossus Cabela’s to jump into the real estate market with both feet, seeking out firms across the west to affiliate with their recreational land sales arm, called Cabela’s Trophy Properties. Cabela’s Trophy Properties’ manager David Nelson told USA Today in a recent story, “Since we already offer everything that sportsmen and women need to succeed in the field, why not make the field itself more accessible?”

Cabela’s is competing in the new market with the original purveyor of flyfishing tackle, Orvis, and with the more established ranch brokers such as Sotheby’s of London, a firm that has been selling art and other objects of great value since 1744. Hall and Hall, based in Montana, has been a ranch broker and real estate services company for decades; their agents have long been on the pioneering edge of the recreational ranch sales and management.

The properties offered range from Orvis’ 312,170-acre Overland Trail Ranch in Wyoming, which includes 22 miles of the excellent trout fishing and trophy whitetail habitat of the North Platte River ($47.5 million), to Cabela’s just-sold Box Elder Ranch ($1.95 million). Advertised as a “hunter’s paradise,” Box Elder is 1,421 acres of upland bird, waterfowl and big game habitat on the austere grasslands near Ekalaka, Montana, almost to the North Dakota line. Hall and Hall just sold the Kootenai Springs Ranch near Stevensville, Montana, a ranch containing extensive wetlands and springfed oxbows of the main Bitterroot River, all meticulously restored by the former owner. That property sold for $14 million. For the more modest buyer, looking for hunting first, Hall and Hall offers “a small sporting property,” the Durfee Creek Ranch, in Grass Range, Montana: 1,120 acres for $1.25 million. The list of properties is long. Almost none of them will be purchased by traditional farmers or ranchers.

The market is dominated by a generation of realtors who may know less about appraisal values of houses than they do about ideal habitat for Hungarian partridge, pheasants or trophy mule deer. Most can expertly define the concept of AUMs (the amount of forage required by a 1000-pound animal for one month) or a “grass and cake operation” to a befuddled San Francisco banker, because many, if not most, are the sons and daughters of ranchers and farmers. But they are more likely to have memorized the telephone number of a consulting fisheries biologist or stream restoration specialist than a cattle buyer.

	A sign advertises a ranch for sale in the Paradise Valley. Photo by Chris Lombardi.

And so far, they operate in a market that seems immune to the ups and downs of more traditional real estate. Jim Taylor, who was raised on a ranch near the Crow Reservation in Montana and has worked at Hall and Hall since 1972, explains, “I get these calls from buyers and they say, ‘Hey Jim, haven’t you heard? The real estate market is in the tank!’ But I go back to what Will Rodgers said, ‘Buy land, cause they ain’t making any more of it.’ We are dealing with a different commodity here.

"Yes, prices for houses and developed properties go up and down, and they are building more and more of them, every day. But they aren’t making any more ranches, and we have a growing bulge of people who want these kinds of properties and have the money to buy them.”

He adds, “They are buying views, buying wildlife, buying privacy. They want to own a whole valley, own their boundaries.”

That “growing bulge,” of these buyers, according to Taylor, “comes from everywhere, but if you want to categorize, you could say, investment bankers, or the owners of small companies that have been monetized –say a mom-and-pop company producing some kind of widgets that makes $1 million in revenue every year, and somebody wants to buy it. And there’s old money in it still. More and more, this is an accepted method of investment for old money. Or for anybody.”

While the trend is difficult to quantify, the "bulge" of buyers clearly has ranchers and farmers in many places seeing green. According to a source at Landwatch.com, which specializes in amenity properties, there has recently been a surge in sellers looking to tap into the vast new market. Three months ago, Landwatch.com listed 600 properties for sale. Today, there are 3,000. "We are getting a lot of interest from sellers here," the source said. "I guess Montana is not just for Montanans anymore."

Dax Hayden, who owns Hayden Outdoors, LLC, a Denver-based affiliate of Cabela’s, explains that the rapid rise in the cost of land leased for hunting in other parts of the country is also driving his sales in the West. “We have clients who have leased property for years, and they have come to the point where they can get together and buy hunting land for the same price.”

Such a boom in lands once considered fly-over country will have far reaching effects on the Great Plains. It is a redefinition of the term “working landscape,” a recognition that, in a world growing more crowded by the day, solitude and wildlife have become a commodity that outstrips the value of crops or livestock, at least on more marginal lands. As Jim Taylor says, “Some places are just going to evolve to whatever their best use is.”

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