‘Recognizable’ names are eyeing 510,527-acre, $725 million slice of North Texas history

It’s been almost a year since Dallas-based broker Bernard Uechtritz and Lubbock’s Sam Middleton announced they were handling the $725-million sale of the 510,527-acre, 166-year-old W.T. Waggoner Estate Ranch that spans six North Texas counties just to the west of Wichita Falls. Since then, says Uechtritz, there’s been “a tremendous amount of interest worldwide.” As he drives through Electra on his way from Dallas to the ranch, he guesstimates there have been 600 inquiries since the sale opened.  “And they range from the really real to the really not,” he says in that instantly recognizable Australian accent. The way he figures it, 40 percent of the “really real” were mighty serious about buying the spread. About 20 percent could actually afford it. He says there are about a dozen wanna-be ranchers left wading in the final buyers’ pool. Of course, he can’t and won’t name names. Let’s just say: “There’s both foreign and domestic interest,” as Uechtritz puts it, “names that are recognizable in Texas and beyond.” He says he’s “fairly confident” they’ll seal a deal by year’s end to sell the ranch named for the oil-and-cattle baron who opened the late, great Arlington Downs racetrack in 1929 on his farm halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. As you might imagine, parting with a gorgeous piece of unspoiled Texas property this size — and with this much history — has been no easy task. As the Associated Press noted last summer, the property — which happens to be the largest contiguous ranch in the U.S. — was put on the market only after the resolution of a decades-long family dispute involving W.T.’s granddaughter Electra Waggoner Biggs, the renowned sculptor for whom the Buick Electra was named. Per the AP, the inventory is estimable: “two main compounds, hundreds of homes, about 20 cowboy camps, hundreds of quarter-horses, thousands of heads of cattle, 1,200 oil wells and 30,000 acres of cultivated land.”...more