Options and Flexibility Fuel Auction Success
On a cool afternoon in September, a string quartet welcomed potential bidders to the historic Virginia estate, Clifton Farms. Familiar ground for us since we sold the property to the current owner in 2014. The owner remembered how straightforward the process had been; the due diligence materials assembled, knowing the date of the transaction, and understanding how the fair market value would be achieved. His second experience with us proved most fruitful, the property sold for $7,480,000, almost twice his initial investment.
Our travels and the release of a book in 2022 connected us with a wide variety of people, places, and properties. A Million Acres and Counting covers a wide variety of experiences with auctions and those experiences continue. We traveled from a 15,000±-acre California ranch-and-olive operation to a historic property in Virginia, once owned by the Washington family. We were fortunate to have an opportunity to market an outstanding farm in Iowa and to help families settle estates in Colorado. Additional stops included marketing a purebred cattle ranch in southwest Missouri and a ranch for a well-known family in eastern Oklahoma.
A successful year didn’t make us immune from market conditions. High-interest rates, surging fuel costs, and a stock market decline increased consumers’ appetite to own a safe physical asset… land. Evolving market conditions drove the need for deeper understanding and more creative solutions to meet buyer and seller expectations. Approaches were focused on creating more options and flexibility for both sides, allowing buyers to bid on specific areas of interest and sellers to surpass pre-auction sales estimates. In one case, nearly $2,000,000 over pre-auction estimates.
Auctions throughout the year followed the same pattern of active bidding and in many cases, new records were achieved including a 104±-acre parcel near Ft. Collins, Colorado that brought $4,000,000. This property was offered in its entirety, but the same level of pre-auction due diligence and marketing was utilized.
Click HERE for our full Year in Review.
Learn more about the auction process and be entertained with Scott Shuman’s numerous anecdotes and experiences from the auction business.
