Recently spoke to a land realtor out of the TX Cross Timbers region about availability and current pricing of properties for sale and he shared some really interesting tidbits with me. He explained that the recent few years tripling, quadrupling, even 5x+ increases in price per acre for land sales can be directly traced to the impact of both COVID and BLM riots. He basically explained that during this time frame, there was a "run on the land market" by urban folks, primarily out of DFW wanting to escape the city sprawl and more experience the rural lifestyle. He said for 3+ years things for realtors were great, high sales commissions and fees banked. Unfortunately, it hasn't sustained the past 12-18 months, namely due to limited sales inventory as well as increased interest rates. Landowners considering selling are mostly doing a 'long hold in hopes rates decline and prices continue going upward". He additionally shared with me that this situation has also greatly squeezed the private land leasing situation with reducing available inventories and rapidly driving up pricing the last few years. He said that he has found a total of 2 hunting leases personally over the past 25+ years, having grown up in the areas and been in land sales in the area the past 20+ years, knowing hundreds of landowners and hunters. To me, this is really concerning and somewhat alarming and quite possibly something rarely if ever seen before on this scale, what say THF?

It's all way over my head and i never understood why people started paying the prices they did for land. Land was high here at 3k an acre and now for 1 acre its as high as 52k. You want 10 acres, get ready to pay about 300k. Luckily i bought in 2017 because i have no clue how our kids will ever make it like we have.

How often have you seen someone on here looking for a lease and they say "within 2 hours of DFW" or some other urban center? There's still land and leases available if you're willing to put in the miles.

More available, yes I'd agree but certainly not as available and certainly significantly higher pricing than 5+ years ago.

The guy across the road says he's got a contract on his 322 acres. He was asking 2.15M. Who knows what he agreed to. North Kimble County. He had it just for hunting. Nobody's running cattle. 'Haven't heard "moo" in a couple of years. A sheep or a goat isn't around for miles.

Rural land ownership will continue be desired.

Leasing land for hunting will continue to trend downwards, especially the year long family type leases we all grew up with

What is going to continue is outfitted package hunts where the landowner can sell X amounts of hunts to offset costs, and he doesent have people at their place 3 months out of the year.

I’ve been selling ranches for a long time. Seen many lease hunters lose out due to a sale. Never seen a landowner buy a tract and keep the lease hunters for more than a season and never seen one take on a season leasee, save for 1 guy who bought an adjacent pasture and let a outfitter lease and then sublease.

Agree with the selective hunts as opposed to annual, even seasonal leasing becoming more the trend...

Best way to look at it, is comparing a long-term residential rental to an Airbnb

There will always be a market for land. There is always an opportunity to buy and increase your wealth through real estate. I can’t tell you how many times people have said “you were lucky to get in before the prices skyrocketed”. First, luck had nothing to do with it. Second and more important, it’s exactly the same opportunity right now.

1. Control your spending and save a down payment (I refused to have a car payment).
2. Do your research and find unimproved land you can service the note on.
3. Buy it with a land bank loan.
4. Improve it yourself over 5 years.
5. Do your research again (really you should never stop)
6. Sell your original property for a massive profit (it’s a given if you did good research).
7. Re-invest through 1031 exchange in a new unimproved place.
8. Repeat the above until you have all the income producing properties you want.

Doesn’t even take 10 steps.

Based on what I've seen both firsthand and on social media, the cost of private leases has pushed a lot of hunters to public land, with some excellent deer being routinely taken.

I’ve done this exact thing. Even down to the 240k mile truck with no note

THF's "Public Hunting" forum does not prove out routinely taken....

Maybe seldomly taken

Those 8 steps are not nearly as easy in today's money world. I agree it can be done but again NOT AS EASY! I paid from 750.00 to 2000.00 an acre for all of my farms that will easily bring 15K per acre WITHOUT the mineral rights which I got when purchasing. So IF this should continue land bought today at 15k per acre would have to increase to a minimum of 120,000.00 per acre to get the same results and I do not see that happening JMO.

I saw lease prices going up rapidly in the mid-late 90's. I was tired of the leasing game so I started buying land in 1998. I was real lucky to buy 5 ranches that bordered each other (bought them over time, not all at once). Prices were a lot cheaper back then and I feel for the folks looking to buy land or find a lease. It's changed a whole lot in my area since 1998.

Agree Stompy, 300-800% increases in land pricing in 3-5 years is not what I've ever seen or heard of before....

With the prices of land and leases hunting is becoming a rich man's sport. I'm 75 years old. I'm still able to hunt but I can no longer afford it. My 28 year old son loves to hunt but he didn't step foot into the woods this year. I really feel sorry for the younger people. They can't afford houses, cars, and hunting.

You're right, it's definitely turning into a rich man's sport.

They can't afford houses, cars, and hunting.

Younger people make decisions on how they spend their money.

Is a 2400 square foot house needed versus 1600? That size house worked for many years.

Is a $100,000 truck needed when a 50,000 will get you down the road.

Are fancy phones needed, society worked fine without cell phone. What does a 6 year old need a phone for?

Are tattoos needed?

Folks can afford what they want to afford.

I hunt in northern Erath county. There are several properties that I drive past on my 3.5 miles caliche road I exit onto. I looked on the CAD website to see who owned these properties that no one lived on in one of the most rural parts of the county. All of the landowners had addresses in areas all over the metroplex. They had all changed owners in the past 10 years, and none lived on these properties. I also check lots of properties (acreage) that sell just to see who buys them and it is almost never a local person. Most of the time it is someone from California or one of the other western states (Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado). I'm thankful that my landowner`s land has been in his family for over 100 years and it means more to him to keep his family's land than to reap the benefits of cashing in. His cousin is the same way and owns 3K acres that surrounds us.

Correct TPACK, more and more land statewide is selling off to those well off lately residing in big cities, out of state or solar and wind company investors' pockets, I've seen this explosion of ownership in Young county to this end over past 5+ years.

If only it were this simple to explain, most of the tens of folks under 30 I work with and know aren't driving 100K trucks, let alone 50K trucks, nor do they live in houses, most either still live at home with parents or in apartments with often one or two roommates to offset 2 bedroom rent of 2-3K monthly. I will concede many have the latest Apple IPhone but that to them is considered more necessity than luxury in today's social media lifestyle. What I can affirmatively state, most are not worrying about how to pay for a $4-5K gun hunting lease out of their $85K annual salary jobs on top of all their other expenses.

I have a feeling I may be looking for a new lease this year as the LO passed 1 1/2 years ago but his wife wants to stay on the property. She already sold off the equipment and leases the grazing rights to a neighbor. Her DFW residing daughter wants her to move in with them. We’ve been there 10 years and would stay forever if possible as we’ve been treated very well. Just the wife and I now hunt on the property and not looking forward to searching for a similar setup.

I do not know of anyone leasing property for hunting around here anymore. The places that actually border me have been divided into 25-acre type parcels. There is a 1000-acre place that used to do hunting for WT and exotics that removed all the exotics and now just runs cattle. Others have HF and are either doing exotic or trophy type WT. I just see how many WT I want taken and get hunters to come out and do that. I used to take care of a place where I ran cattle. A very old lady owned it and leased it out to 3 hunters. I had to put up with their crap. My cows were eating the corn. My cows tried to kill them. They tried to put blinds on the fence line. The list goes on and on. I finally got tired of the crap so I paid for the lease myself and brought out a few hunters and took the number of deer I needed to pay for the lease. Problem solved. State of hunting in 5 years? Hard to say but I believe the days of year around leases are coming to an end. If you can afford to buy a place at today's prices you sure don't need the lease money.

Don't hear much about "paper company" leases anymore, but it seems that they were a lot cheaper than private leases.

Do they still exist?

This is true in many cases. Landowners don't want the headache of lease hunters

All it takes is discipline and commitment. So easy a clown can do it lol

I agree 100%. Ours doesn`t need the money either. He ran off the hunters before us because they treated it like they owned it bringing entire family year-round like it was an RV park with a built in moto cross track for grand kids. There is junk (old rotten deer blinds) still spread out over our lease that they just left including a 24' camper and several years of junk around their camp (pathetic). We do our best to act like the guest that we are and only use it from mid-August until mid-January.

I hauled 9 crap deer blinds, and 2 or 3 trashed-out feeders, to the dump and hired the "cabin" razed and hauled off. Pure PWT.

Why the price//value/demand increase? The dirt/rocks/water hasn’t changed. Inflation and/or demand? Why?

In a way, I’m a beneficiary. The junk land I bought 35-40 years ago for almost nothing hasn’t changed much but the value certainly has. Why? Inflation certainly plays a part. But, it’s still only good for recreation. Good for nothing but hunting, shooting, fishing, chunking rocks.

It’s not like a store that you can sell stuff out of. Well, I’m actually loaded with rocks if anybody needed some.

I can’t raise crops or livestock on that POS. No way I could afford to buy it now.

Land is a finite resource that has seen incredible increases in value in the last 30 years. It has far outpaced the inflation value of the dollar. Scarcity breeds demand.

My family bought a 1200 acre, unimproved ranch about an hour and a half south of San Antonio in December of 1994 for $330/acre. If you follow straight inflation, it would be worth about $700/acre today. The actual value is about $4500/acre. And that’s just south Texas brush county. Places you could have bought in the hill country during that same time for $1200/acre are worth $12,000/acre now. All recreational land.

Don’t discount the value of recreation. People see the importance of it and will pay for it. That’s why we have things like sports cars, ski boats, etc. not everything has to have production value to be valuable.


You listed about 3 things in your “good for nothing” argument that people will pay premiums for.

Still think your land is junk ?

I do not miss my lessors at all. Too many challenges.

I gave up looking for a lease years ago and found a wife whose family owns around a 1,000 acres. Win/win.

Now that's using your head for something besides a hat rack.

There’s a fair amount of large properties around here and almost everyone is done leasing. All the above plus treating it like it’s a shooting range, tearing up roads just to do it and the easiest way to not get a lease renewed, tannerite.

Yelp, From a ranching/farm owner perspective it’s good drought insurance or fence money, but it’s not close to same revenue of cattle or farming for vast majority of operations, there are exceptions but with way cattle prices are trending, I wouldn’t # in the landowners cheerios. They could make more money cleaning up pasture with an excavator and increasing stocking units

Having to get around when it's wet is one thing. Rutting all over the place, thinking you're going to find a better way, then not mention a peep to the landowner is a sure way not to be invited back. He won't be back. Yet another "guide" that never...ever...shut up!

TxTrophy, yeah, I think it’s junk land because it’s non productive. Unless it’s toys for kids, I like to look at value when I buy stuff.

BTW, I’m debt free. Raised on a farm/ranch that didn’t raise cows for pets. They had to pay their own way. Same for equipment.

I have to have a vehicle and know that’s a sure thing to wear out and have to be replaced. Not an investment but an out of pocket expense that I can’t depreciate for taxes.

My 133 acres of junk land was paid off many years ago. Since I don’t lease the grazing or hunting, it’s an expense that I accept. It’s been a great investment. I paid $43,500 for it. According to realtors, it will sell for over a million bucks. But, until I convert it to cash, it’s an out of pocket expense that I accept for sanity. My rent houses are doing a little over breaking even. Like the ranch, they have increased in value that I can’t spend.

Due to terrain and vegetation it’s a net, out of pocket, expense every year. Can’t graze it. I could recover some $ by leasing hunting.

It’s about like a non working trophy wife.

I agree...people around Austin area are not even hunters or complete outdoors types. They just want a place to get away to for recreation. Everyone I know wishes they had 10-50 acres for this even if nothing is on it, all grass or all trees. You cannot just go camping at a state park without planning months in advance and you still are pretty close to your neighbors. And with so many people moving around here and traffic so bad, people are finding rural land easier to get to, and away from it all. Being able to work remotely after COVID has also driven prices up. I think 2 hours or less away from a major City or Town prices will continue to climb at a fast rate, while more remote places 3+ hours away will likely climb a little slower. Another thing driving costs up is what was discussed, solar, wind, radio tower leases, and the latest one is data centers near major power sources. Always something especially closer to Cities and infastructure. All of this driving leases up and will prevent new people from getting into the sport.

Along with demand for land, Federal Reserve money printing will continually drive inflation as a whole, and land prices specifically. I don't see the price per acre increases stopping, on the contrary, I see them accelerating.
More money chasing the same amount of land.

Bingo. I was told as a kid to buy land, they are not making anymore of it.

It has production value. That value is in the wildlife and recreational aspect. It may not be the same as a commodity crop or livestock, but it is there.

Comparing real estate to a vehicle is apples to oranges. one is an appreciating asset, the other is a depreciating asset.


One major thing that has changed since you bought your land is the affordability for "average" people who are buying in.

Say you bought it in 1990. $43,500 is the equivalent today to about $104,000. Many working class people could afford a $100k land note with 20% down. But you said your property is valued now at around $1mm. Buyer pool shrinks by a lot in that dollar range. So what's happened with the market and the value of real estate and how it relates to hunting, is that what was once an affordable hunting tract for a middle class family is now unaffordable. Have a high school buddy who's parents bought 50 acres in Colorado county with a nice little 1 bdrm ranch house on it sometime in the early 90s. Don't know what they paid for it, but his dad was retired from a hourly job for Union Pacific and his mom was a vet tech. Normal, every day people. His dad thought real hard about selling when land got to $5k/acre, which would have put about $250k in his pocket. Now that property is worth about $20k/acre or $1mm. So when it was acquired, it was within reach of a working class family as a play place, now it is not.

Now, the working class is buying smaller 20–40-acre tracts in secondary areas because that's what is affordable for their budgets. Hunting isn't something that's at the forefront but just having a place away from the city to hike around, ride a 4 wheeler and shoot a few guns is their motivation for buying.


As landholdings have gotten smaller and value per acre has increased and the demographic of landowners has changed, people are not needing/wanting the lease money to offset operating costs to own these properties. They are keeping the hunting for friends and family or otherwise choosing not to lease at all. I know of tens of thousands of acres that are not leased and really not hunted, simply due to the landowners not wanting the headaches of dealing with it. I've been around plenty of leases that have sold and very few of them really take care of the property like an owner would and when they leave, 99 out of 100 times, they leave a mess that has to be cleaned up. Just not worth the hassle.

The number of leases available will continue to shrink, while the price of what is available will continue to go up. That is going to be the outlook on leases for the foreseeable future

Trophy, great description of what is occurring out there with skyrocketing land prices

What has me concerned is they but 10 acres of land because that's all they can afford and want to shoot their guns like they owned 3 or 4 hundred acres. Really bothers me! Have heard of some areas are passing laws for archery only related to acreage.

It’s not only a safety issue but a nuisance. I like a 50 acre minimum to discharge a centerfire rifle and have placed that restriction on several properties I have sold.

Not trying to limit people fun, but no one wants to hear their neighbor doing mag dumps at dusk.

Those little parcels oftentimes have these issues. Was at a buddies place this morning, a couple years back the neighbor sold and the guy tried to flip it. When that failed he cut it into 20-30 acre tracts and sold it owner finance. Some of the best brush country in south Texas, ruined.

Now it looks like a Colonia with travel trailers camps and shanty shacks every 1/4 mile. He heard 8 shots in one evening coming from there last week. Will be devoid of animals in another year

And that's exactly the message public land hunters want to become mainstream. And the ones who often claim how difficult it can be to take a nice buck on public land, or tout safety concerns, help the cause as well.

Totally agree.I've been fortunate enough that either me my neighbors or us together have bought the places around our farms in the past so pretty secure for now but definitely concerned for my kids and grandkids years down the line. Seeing more and more "colonias" as you stated!

An investor that I met and talked to a long time ago has bought land on 2 sides of me. One is land locked. He doesn’t do anything with them and never visits. Just buys and holds them. It is my understanding that he has 15 to 20 different properties. He is a Vietnamese refugee from the 1960’s.

The rural realtors know about him.He pays cash and offers a substantial discount for a quick sale.

Some good insight here.

As to Leasing, Don K summed it up: Those who can either afford to purchase large acreage OR inherited large acreage don't care about the comparably-small money Leases bring in. Not worth the hassle to them. The days of the farmer/rancher who lived/worked the land and leased to bring in a little cash, pay the taxes are just about over. Good "affordable" year round leases will continue to trend down in availability while demand will be up due to high land prices.

On Land Prices: Pretty well summed up by TxTrophy85 and others. As our society urbanizes, rural land within a "reasonable" drive will continue to increase in price, especially if there are towns with amenities (restaurants, wineries, shopping, etc) close by. The urban population will drive value. "Affordable" land will be that which requires a further drive than folks want to make for a "quick weekend trip."

We bought 24 acres in 2019. I initially thought I wanted 100 in the Hill Co (~4 hr away) but soon saw the wisdom in something 1.5 hr away near a town that my wife would enjoy as well and we'd use much more often. At the time I thought the price was insane, but did it anyway because I saw the trend. Now it's worth 3X that and we'll likely move there full time once kids out of high school here in Katy.

Do your research. Buy smart. Get in the game when you are able to. Waiting rarely results in lower prices (but may result in lower interest rates in next 12 months). My $.02.

TxTrophy, to my way of thinking it is junk, albeit damn expensive junk. It produces nothing but a getaway place to shoot, hunt and fish with taxes. But, the best financial deal I’ve ever done. Without the wildlife exemption, I couldn’t keep it.

I used to get a lot of mail from realtors and investors about it. Im 82 yoa and, sooner or later, the place has to go.
After paying a whopping amount of taxes, we would be able to go and do just about anything. I have the $ to do those things now but am financially conservative. I remember, many years ago coming out of a divorce dead broke. It took awhile to get financially secure and I’m not going back there.

Don’t agree about Covid and BLM being the driving force behind the land boom. That place has been increasing in value since I first bought it. About 25 years ago, I bought some adjoining 65 acres. Kept it about 5 years and quadrupled what I paid for it.

I think the real culprits are inflation due to political mismanagement/theft, migration to Texas and just a desire to get out of the city.

Actually I said it Dave as it was said verbatim to me by a very successful realtor to explain, just the last 5 year explosion in prices, not all price increases....I have no reason to doubt his honesty about it and have even heard others say it too