Texas Pacific Land Corporation (TPL)

[Enterprising Investor]

Los Angeles Rams Owner Stan Kroenke to Buy Waggoner Ranch in Texas (2/09/16)

Vast property was listed at a record $725 million

By Joe Light

sprawling, 535,000-acre Texas ranch will be sold to billionaire Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke in a deal approved by a court Tuesday.

The terms weren’t disclosed, but the property had been listed for $725 million.

A sale price anywhere close to that figure would far outstrip any other in dollar value for a U.S. ranch, surpassing hedge-fund giant Louis Bacon’s 2007 purchase of Colorado’s Trinchera Blanca Ranch for $175 million, according to according to Eric O’Keefe, editor of industry news outlet The Land Report.

The deal includes everything that comes with the property, including 7,500 head of cattle, 500 horses, 30,000 acres of farmland and 1,200 oil wells yielding 675,000 barrels a year.

The deal, expected to close within days, marks the end of a family rivalry that stretches back to 1923, when cattle baron W.T. Waggoner put the ranch into a trust to protect the family’s assets from his three children’s allegedly spendthrift ways.

By the 2000s it escalated into a court dispute between various heirs about how to liquidate the estate. In August 2014, a state judge in Vernon, Texas, granted court-appointed receiver Michael Baskerville permission to put the ranch up for sale.

Mr. Baskerville said a judge signed off on the agreement Tuesday and that Mr. Kroenke plans to continue operating the ranch and possibly step up activity.

The Waggoner property, roughly 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth, spans 800 square miles across six Texas counties. It stretches across seemingly endless prairie covered in water-guzzling mesquite, four man-made lakes and pastures dotted with cows and oil pumps.

The property can hold up to 16,000 head of cattle. Deer, turkey and feral pigs scamper freely across its pastures, with no commercial hunting allowed on the property.

The ranch’s owners and promoters herald it as the largest contiguous U.S. ranch that is surrounded by a single fence.

Yet with roughly $40 million to $50 million in annual revenue and a staff of 120, the Waggoner ranch isn’t nearly as lucrative as the famed King Ranch, the larger but noncontiguous ranch in South Texas known for agribusiness, ranching and hunting.

Bernie Uechtritz, one of the brokers for the sellers, said that they fielded more than 900 inquiries from potential buyers, narrowing the list to a half-dozen finalists.

Mr. Kroenke last month won approval to move the Rams to Los Angeles from St. Louis. He already owns ranch property in British Columbia, Arizona, Montana and Wyoming, said Joel Leadbetter, a broker who represented Mr. Kroenke.

“Stan will be the second owner in history. This ranch is very historic in Texas and in the whole United States. Those ranches are hard to come by,” Mr. Leadbetter said.

Most Waggoner cowboys wear spurs, chaps and horseshoe mustaches. Smartphones poke out of the breast pockets of their button-down shirts.

“The cowboy way is dying out, and I’d like to see it stay for a while,” said Weldon Hawley, the 64-year-old ranch manager who first worked on the Waggoner property in 1970 and still rides herd on cattle there.

“It’s been an awful good life for some of us.,” Mr. Hawley said. “It’s an extremely good place to raise your children. A lot of us have worked here for many years, many generations.

“It’s not really a job,” he added. “It’s a way of life.”

—Kris Hudson contributed to this article.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/los-angeles-rams-owner-stan-kroenke-to-buy-waggoner-ranch-in-texas-1455060248