Yours for $725m: Texas ranch for sale bigger than New York and LA combined
WT Waggoner Estate ranch, which spans six counties, has become one of ranching history’s best-known names since Dan Waggoner began work in 1849
Mahita Gajanan in New York, Tuesday 21 July 2015 16.33 EDT
For $725m, you can buy a ranch in Texas that is bigger than New York City and Los Angeles combined.
At 510,527 acres, the WT Waggoner Estate ranch spans six counties of north Texas. It is the largest ranch in the US within a single fence, and the highest-priced estate in the world.
The estate buyer will acquire the ranch, with two main compounds, 30,000 acres of cultivated land, thousands of heads of cattle, hundreds of quarter-horses and 1,200 oil wells, along with thousands of acres of unexplored land, according to Dallas-based broker Bernard Uechtritz.
“To me, the ranch has unlimited blue sky,” Uechtritz told the Guardian. “It was developed when Oklahoma was still Indian territory. Abraham Lincoln was still in Congress.”
Waggoner is one of the two biggest names in ranching history worldwide; the other is King Ranch in south Texas, said Uechtritz.
Dan Waggoner started ranching the property in 1849. The Waggoners were prominent developers of Hereford cattle, pedigree American quarter-horses and thoroughbred horses.
The ranch has remained in the Waggoner family; it was established as an estate in 1923 by WT Waggoner. The estate is finally on the market following decades of disputes among Waggoner’s heirs over how to liquidate the property.
More than 600 people have already expressed interest in buying the ranch. Uechtritz said buyers have been narrowed down to about a dozen and he expects to “have a winner soon”.
But Uechtritz warned that potential buyers could be rejected if they are not good people who understand the spirit of the ranch.
“Philosophically, what we’d personally like to see transpire is that the buyer also be a good steward of the land, and a friend of the people,” he said.
Local residents have been worried that oil drillers or foreign investors will divide up the land and fire ranch employees in an effort to make a profit rather than preserve history, the Associated Press reported last year.
But when asked about the concerns of local people, Uechtritz said they had little to worry about.
“The truth of the matter is that anybody who buys a ranch in an operation of this size is going to retain every single person that currently operates the ranch,” he said. “You can’t operate something like this without the people.”
The ranch currently employs 120 people, and several employees are multi-generational, with parents and grandparents having worked on the ranch before them.
Uechtritz and his co-broker Sam Middleton each stand to collect a commission of $7.625m if the ranch commands its asking price.
Currently, 56,000 acres of the estate have been developed for oil, leaving more than 450,000 acres untapped. The two sides of the Waggoner family who have been fighting over the estate will each retain 12.5% of the mineral rights in any sale.
