"FOR SALE: Largest ranch in the U.S. within a single fence. Texas fixer-upper..."
From Bloomberg:
FOR SALE: Largest ranch in the U.S. within a single fence. Texas
fixer-upper with more than 1,000 oil wells; 6,800 head of cattle; 500
quarter horses; 30,000 acres of cropland; tombstones for legendary
cowboys, long-dead dogs, and a horse buried standing up. Favorite of
Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Colorful history of drinking and
divorce. Fifteen-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon.
Ideal for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers
who can tell a cow from a steer. Profitable. Zero debt. Property taxes
only $800,000 a year. Price: $725 million.
“It takes days to see it all,” says
Bernard Uechtritz. The real estate broker is steering his black Ford
F-350 pickup over one of the hundreds of miles of roads ribboning the
W.T. Waggoner Estate Ranch 175 miles (280 kilometers) northwest of
Dallas. Squinting into the sun, Uechtritz gestures to the sky on his
right. “Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is the
ranch,” he says. He points straight ahead, then behind him, then left.
“Each horizon is this ranch.”
Uechtritz (YOO-tridge) is one of two brokers entrusted
with the singular task of selling the Waggoner ranch and everything
attached to it, from the 29 tractors, to the cut-rock polo barn, to the
emptied bottles of Old Taylor bourbon in an abandoned hunting lodge. At
510,527 acres (207,000 hectares), or 800 square miles (2,072 square
kilometers), the Waggoner sprawls over six counties and is bigger than
Los Angeles and New York City combined. At almost three-quarters of a
billion dollars, the asking price is more than quadruple the biggest
publicly known sum fetched by a U.S. ranch, $175 million for a Colorado
spread in 2007. The Waggoner is one of the 20 largest cattle ranches in
the U.S. and is known worldwide for its quarter horses.
It’s been owned by the same family almost as long as Texas has been a
state. Last year, a judge in Vernon—a town of about 11,000, 13 miles
north of the ranch—ordered a sale of the property and appointed
Uechtritz and a co-broker to market it worldwide. The ruling of District
Judge Dan Mike Bird ended more than 20 years of litigation between
opposing branches of the Waggoner family who couldn’t agree whether to
liquidate the property or split it up among themselves.
“It’s history,” says Uechtritz, a blue-eyed, square-jawed
50-year-old who can pass for the Marlboro Man—until he greets you with
“G’day” in his Australian accent. “What we’re doing here never happened
before and will never happen again.”
As Uechtritz drives the ranch on this warm June afternoon, he
takes a call from an oilman in Europe. Over speakerphone, the guy says
his company tried to bid for the Waggoner years ago, “but all we got was
bullshit.” Uechtritz tells him, “That’s not going to happen, mate.”...MUCH MORE
But Wait, There's More
A smattering of the more than 4,000 items listed on the 183-page inventory of things being sold with the Waggoner ranch:
Pink poodle lamp
Horse head lamp
Muzak paging system
IBM Selectric typewriter
Steel barn, 21-feet-by-80-feet
1973 Ford two-ton firetruck
1984 International firetruck
1998 16-foot-by-80-foot Masterpiece mobile home...
