San Luis Valley ranch: $105 million
Looking for a breathtaking deal? Buyers are flocking to multimillion-dollar spreads.
After a slow year for high-end sales, buyers are circling for multimillion-dollar spreads across the West. Brokers in Aspen are reporting a surge in luxury homes sales and ranch brokers are seeing revived interest in mega properties.
“By the end of this quarter, we should exceed what we did all last year,” said Ken Mirr, whose Mirr Ranch Group markets some of the largest and priciest ranches in the West.
Mirr’s latest offering is the storied Cielo Vista Ranch in the San Luis Valley, listed at $105 million. The 83,368acre property encompasses the 14,049-foot Culebra Peak and 18 13,000-foot peaks stretching across more than 20 miles of Sangre de Cristo ridgeline.
“Look around the U.S. and there’s really nothing like it. It’s like owning your own national park. There is a unique wildness to that property,” said Mirr, a day after taking potential buyers on a helicopter tour of the 13,000-acre Wasatch Peaks Ranch in Utah, which includes 11 miles of Wasatch Mountains ridgeline, including 24 peaks. It is listed at $46 million.
The Cielo Vista Ranch has a renowned history in Colorado. In the mid-1800s, Mexico granted the ranch to a French-Canadian trapper who then deeded Mexican and Spanish settlers part of the ranch as an attempt to colonize the San Luis Valley before Colorado won statehood.
Those settler deeds granted access to several Sangre de Cristo peaks for grazing, hunting and logging. In 1960, North Carolina lumberman Jack Taylor bought the property from heirs of Colorado’s first territorial governor, who bought the property from heirs of the trapper. He logged the property, closing access to his Taylor Ranch, sparking a violent range war that lasted for decades.
Taylor’s family sold the ranch in 1988 to Enron executive Lou Pai for $20 million.
In 2002, the Colorado Supreme Court ended a 30year lawsuit by restoring wood gathering and grazing rights to heirs of the original settlers, but denying hunting and fishing rights. Pai fought the ruling, but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
In 2004, Pai sold the ranch to a consortium of Texas ranchers for $60 million. The Texas group renamed the ranch Cielo Vista. Shortly after the deal, a district judge gave more than 500 descendants of the Spanish and Mexican settlers access to the land for livestock grazing, firewood gathering and timbering.
The ranch has apparently appreciated by 75 percent in the last 13 years and 425 percent since the Taylor family put it on the market back in 1988.
But appraising properties like Cielo Vista is not an exact science. Billionaire hedge-fund owner and renowned conservationist Louis Bacon paid $175 million for the 172,000-acre Trinchera Ranch in 2007, paying about $1,100 an acre for the ranch that is north of Cielo Vista in the San Luis Valley. Trinchera’s per-acre cost is not far off the $1,250per-acre price tag for Cielo Vista.
“There’s no real science for appraising properties like this,” said Mirr, whose firm has been brokering big ranch sales since 2005 and counts Cielo Vista as its highest-priced property ever. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Mirr, a former public lands and conservation attorney, said he hopes to see a conservationist like Bacon step up and protect Cielo Vista, which comes with an assortment of modest ranch homes and a hunting lodge, but is largely undeveloped. (Mirr pitched it as “a blank canvas.”)
“It could be anything. Someone could buy it and turn it into a park,” he said. “Whoever it is, they will be the next steward.”