Big Ranches in Texas

Brokers Bernard Uechtritz, left, and Sam Middleton at farm head office in Vernon, 13 kilometers north of ranch.

FOR SALE: premier ranch inside U.S. within one fence. Texas fixer-upper with over 1, 000 oil wells; 6, 800 head of cattle; 500 one-fourth horses; 30, 000 miles of cropland; tombstones for popular cowboys, long-dead puppies, and a horse buried standing up. Preferred of Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Colorful history of consuming and divorce. Fifteen-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon. Well suited for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers who can tell a cow from a steer. Worthwhile. Zero financial obligation. Home taxes just $800, 000 a-year. Price: $725 million.

“It takes times to see it all, ” says Bernard Uechtritz. The true property agent is steering their black colored Ford F-350 pickup over among the hundreds of kilometers of roads ribboning the W.T. Waggoner Estate Ranch 175 miles (280 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. Squinting into the sunlight, Uechtritz gestures towards sky on their right. “Everything you can observe, as far as the eye can easily see, is the farm, ” he states. He tips directly forward, then behind him, then left. “Each horizon is it farm.”

Uechtritz (YOO-tridge) is one of two agents entrusted utilizing the singular task of selling the Waggoner farm and everything mounted on it, through the 29 tractors, into the cut-rock polo barn, on emptied bottles of Old Taylor bourbon in an abandoned hunting lodge. At 510, 527 miles (207, 000 hectares), or 800 square miles (2, 072 square kilometers), the Waggoner sprawls over six counties and is bigger than la and nyc combined. At nearly three-quarters of a billion bucks, the price tag is more than quadruple the biggest publicly known amount fetched by a U.S. farm, $175 million for a Colorado spread in 2007. The Waggoner is one of the 20 biggest cattle ranches inside U.S. and is known around the world because of its quarter ponies.

But Wait, There Is More

A smattering of the above 4, 000 things noted on the 183-page stock of things for sale using Waggoner farm:

Pink poodle lamp

Horse head lamp

Muzak paging system

IBM Selectric typewriter

Metal barn, 21-feet-by-80-feet

1973 Ford two-ton firetruck

1984 Overseas firetruck

1998 16-foot-by-80-foot Masterpiece mobile house

Waterline from Vernon, Tx

It’s been owned by the same family members practically so long as Tx was a state. Just last year, a judge in Vernon—a city of approximately 11, 000, 13 kilometers north regarding the ranch—ordered a-sale of the home and appointed Uechtritz and a co-broker to market it globally. The ruling of District Judge Dan Mike Bird ended more than two decades of litigation between opposing limbs for the Waggoner family just who couldn’t concur whether or not to liquidate the home or split it among by themselves.

“It’s history, ” claims Uechtritz, a blue-eyed, square-jawed 50-year-old who is able to pass for the Marlboro Man—until he greets you with “G’day” inside the Australian accent. “What we’re doing right here never happened before and certainly will never ever happen again.”

As Uechtritz drives the farm on this hot June afternoon, he takes a telephone call from an oilman in Europe. Over speakerphone, the guy says their organization attempted to bid for the Waggoner years back, “but all we got had been bullshit.” Uechtritz informs him, “That’s perhaps not gonna take place, mate.”

He wends their pickup past a vintage rodeo corral, a vehicle scale, and a cook shack where cowboys still gobble pre-dawn cookies and gravy, while they have actually for more than a century. Uechtritz says the European caller is among above 600 individuals who’ve expressed interest in the ranch, “ranging from the really genuine into the not.” He states he’s confident a-sale will nearby year’s end. His co-broker on the deal is Sam Middleton, of Chas. S. Middleton & Son of Lubbock, Texas. That company and Uechtritz’s boss, Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty of Dallas, each will collect a commission of $7.625 million if ranch commands its selling price.