“Everybody was at home on the internet looking at ranch porn" Luxury ranch sales are booming

...The hot market has been a boon, too, for some big-name sellers with ultra high-end properties. In May, Tom Cruise sold his 320-acre ranch in Telluride, Colorado, for $40 million. That was the same amount he listed it for two months earlier, though far below its original $59 million asking in 2014.

And in January, fashion designer Tom Ford found a buyer for his 20,000-acre Cerro Pelon ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which listed for $48 million. It had hit the market for $75 million in 2016.

Stratospheric sales aside, brokers say the real sweet spot has been ranch properties that sell for a few million dollars and have hundreds to a few thousand acres.

United Country, whose properties average about 5,000 acres each, classifies the luxury category as $1 million and up; it claims to sell more ranches in the U.S. at that price range than any other brokerage. Average closing price for ranches under the United Country umbrella was $3.6 million last year, Duffy said.

Sanctuary Ranch’s listing broker Jim Taylor, a principal at Hall and Hall, said the firm had its best year of sales ever in 2020, “by orders of magnitude.”

“Everybody was at home on the internet looking at ranch porn,” he said, referring to the pandemic lockdowns.

Taylor added this year is shaping up to be even stronger for the Montana-based brokerage, which specializes in ranches and farm properties and has offices across the Western U.S.

As of late May, Hall and Hall’s sales volume was already two-thirds of the way to what the brokerage did for all of 2020. The ranch boom has tracked with overall demand for homes, which continues to rise nationwide, as buyers push prices higher.

But dwindling inventory has become an increasing issue, Taylor said. Hall and Hall had 102 listings at the end of May, compared to about 135 at the same time last year.

The recent shortage was inevitable, brokers said, given that out-of-state prospectors began scooping up rural properties as far back as last spring. That’s when Texas saw an influx of ranch buyers from Florida, Arizona, California and New York, said Dustin Ray, co-owner of 1836 Realty Group. Located near San Antonio and affiliated with United Country, the brokerage now has about half the inventory it did a year ago, Ray said, and demand has been the strongest in a dozen years.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE