This $725M Ranch Puts Our Most Expensive Megamansion to Shame

We’ve been fascinated by our most expensive listing, a 25-acre Beverly Hills estate now priced at $149 million, since it went on the market almost a year ago—and so have you. Week after week, the 12-bedroom compound with 16 bathrooms is a constant on our list of top 10 most popular homes.

Well, now there’s a new contender—and it’s huge. CNN brings us the tale of Texas’ Waggoner Ranch, which comprises 510,527 acres and more than 100 buildings. Yes, it’s true: 1700 Deaf Smith in Vernon has more land than Los Angeles and New York City combined. It’s also more than half the size of Delaware. It reaches across six North Texas counties; according to its website, it’s “the largest ranch in Texas under one fence.”

What to fill up all that property with? “Rolling stock, ranch equipment, oilfield equipment, cattle inventory, horse inventory, horse facilities, brands, intellectual property and the Waggoner Office Building in Vernon,” according to the listing. There are creeks, rivers, and lakes; level and broken land; and cedar, hackberry, and soapberry trees. Also, if 19 cowboy camps weren’t enough for you, this one has 20.

So, is this tidbit a good thing or a bad thing for a Texan buyer? There’s never been any commercial hunting allowed on the land, so there are “good populations of deer, turkey, quail, dove, water fowl and feral hogs,” who love the water and the wheat fields.

The other thing in abundance here: oil, in the form of 1,000 producing wells. But don’t go joining the Beverly Hillbillies yet. The winner gets only 41.67% of the mineral rights. In other words, you can have all the land, but you can’t have all the oil. Two other parties will also retain rights to the mineral profits, says Bernard Uechtritz, the listing agent with Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International.

Uechtritz, who took on the listing in August 2014, has fielded about 700 inquiries since. But it’s getting time to round up those offers. Potential, and pre-qualified, buyers have to submit their offers by Oct. 20; a couple of dozen viable offers have purportedly already been made. And if you want to tour the property before that, you’d better act fast. Uechtritz says it takes three to four days to fully tour the place.

If you decide that the property is just too expensive, or there’s too much land, perhaps you can pick up a Waggoner Ranch hat. You can get that for $14.95.

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