END OF A RIDE
Meanwhile, back at the Imus ranch,, it’s the...
Don Imus’ shuttered ranch in New Mexico is headed for the auction block, The Post has learned.
The opening bid on the 2,400-acre spread, where Imus for years had played host to kids with cancer, will be $5 million in an auction that’s slated for June 15, the famously cranky radio jock told The Post.
“We really would love to turn it over to a group that does something with it like we did — someone with an altruistic heart,” Imus said in a phone interview this week.
The 76-year-old host of the “Imus in the Morning Show” on Cumulus Media’s 77WABC initially tried to sell the spread — 50 miles southeast of Santa Fe — for $35 million nearly three years ago.
The ranch, which stopped taking in sick kids in 2014, includes a 15,000-square-foot hacienda that Architectural Digest featured on its cover in December 2001.
After failing to attract any bidders, Imus lowered the price to $29.9 million — and then to $19.9 million before the listing expired last October, said Craig Huitfeldt, the Santa Fe realtor who had the listing.
Over the years, the ranch’s nonprofit status, coupled with frequent personal use by the Imus family, made the ranch a periodic target of tax investigations, including ones by the attorneys general of New Mexico and New York.
The probes have ended without action.
In October 2014, after deciding to put the property up for sale, Imus cited health issues stemming from a ribbreaking fall from a horse at the ranch.
“It’s difficult to breathe there,” he told the Albuquerque Journal, speaking of the 7,000-feet altitude of the ranch in Ribero, NM.
The working ranch stopped catering to kids after the summer season of 2014, and Imus relocated to Brenham, Texas — halfway between Austin and Houston and situated just 495 feet above sea level. He also reduced his radio show to three hours, after logging four hours each weekday for decades.
“After 17 years, it just ran its course,” Imus said of the ranch and the charity.
The ranch includes a second lot owned by Imus and his wife, Deirdre, that is valued at $3 million.
The upcoming auction is expected to be run by Thomas Industries of Guilford, Conn., Barry Chappel, an executive vice president at the firm, said.
Imus, who incorporated the ranch as a nonprofit organization in 1999, told The Post that all proceeds from the sale will flow to the nonprofit, where as a director he hopes to redirect them to “other camps and organizations.”
About 100 youngsters between the ages of 10 and 17 would rotate through the ranch weekly during the summer, staying with the Imus family in five desig- nated bedrooms in the main ranch house, he said.
Outfitted with cowboy gear obtained from the ranch’s “general store,” the kids would work part of each day and then hone such ranch skills as roping and riding a horse.
The talk-show host maintained a studio at the ranch, from which he’d broadcast his syndicated program during the summer months.