Land Report January 2013 Newsletter

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announces his plan to leave Washington and return home to Colorado. The Supreme Court agrees to hear a dispute between Texas and Oklahoma over water rights. And the State of Texas, on a completely different matter, asks the Nation’s highest court to intervene in yet another water fight, one that involves Texas and another neighbor, New Mexico.

So much for a slow start to 2013. Our January newsletter features these news items and as well as others, including Land Report 100er Louis Bacon’s timeless gift to establish the Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area in Southern Colorado.

For up-to-the minute reports on listings, auctions, sales, and breaking news pertaining to land and landowners, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Power Struggle

Louis Bacon fends off utility companies as they try to build transmission lines across his Colorado ranch. He also adds North Carolina’s Orton Plantation to his portfolio.

In 2007, London-based hedge fund manager Louis Bacon claimed his place on The Land Report 100 when he paid the heirs of Malcolm Forbes $175 million for Southern Colorado’s Trinchera Ranch. The 171,400-acre property is a haven of biodiversity and includes three of Colorado’s majestic Fourteeners. In the three short years since, Bacon has been recognized as a keen steward of the land; he’s even been singled out by Colorado’s Division of Wildlife for his support in their management of several species.

Not surprisingly, Bacon opposes Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association’s proposed $180 million transmission line project across his ranch. “Having helped many others in their fights against outside, profitoriented polluters, I couldn’t shirk this battle when I know there is so much at stake for the San Luis Valley residents, the range, the environment, the animals, and for all of Colorado,” he told The Denver Post via email.

Bacon enjoyed a well-established reputation as a land steward prior to buying Trinchera. He has put conservation easements on several trophy properties, including the Sound of Music Ranch on Wilson Mesa outside of Telluride, Cow Neck Farm in the Hamptons, and Robins Island in Peconic Bay at the eastern end of Long Island.

In November, the Raleigh native added another signature property to his portfolio when he closed on North Carolina’s historic Orton Plantation, a colonial estate that was originally owned by an ancestor named Roger Moore. The 8,300-acre landmark had been owned by the Sprunt family since 1884 and is crowned by the last remaining pre-Civil War manor house on the Lower Cape Fear. (The grand structure was spared by Union forces, who used it as a military hospital.) According to the Wilmington Star News, revenue stamps associated with the deeds put the sale price of the Brunswick County estate at $45 million.

Sale of the Forbes Trinchera Ranch

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses one the biggest sales of 2007, the 171,000-acre Forbes Trinchera Ranch in Colorado to hedge fund manager Louis Bacon. Read more

Sold! Forbes Trinchera Ranch

The Forbes family has sold the ranch. In the largest transaction involving The Land Report 100 in 2007, the four sons and one daughter of Malcolm Forbes signed off on the sale of their 171,400-acre Trinchera Ranch in Southern Colorado to hedge fund manager Louis Bacon of Moore Capital for $175 million on November 15, 2007. Bacon, who runs Moore Capital Management and was estimated to be worth $1.8 billion by Forbes, ranked No. 262 on the magazine’s list of the wealthiest Americans this year.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.

So what did Bacon get for $175 million? For starters, the largest remaining undeveloped tract within the historic Sangre de Cristo land grant, an enormous swath of snow-capped peaks, grassland valleys, and vast expanses of conifer forest. The original 1843 land grant encompassed more than 1 million acres and extended from Northern New Mexico above Taos into Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The Sangre de Cristo was subsequently carved up, parceled off, and the subject of countless legal shenanigans.

More than a century later, Malcolm Forbes bought the Trinchera Ranch, which is located in Costilla County 160 miles southwest of Denver near Fort Garland. Forbes later acquired an adjacent parcel called the Blanca Ranch to create the present property.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.

What didn’t Bacon get for $175 million? For one thing, he doesn’t have the right to develop the 267-square-mile tract. Those rights were given away in 2004 when the Forbes family donated the largest conservation easement in the state’s history to Colorado Open Lands, a non-profit land trust. In return for this gift, the family received a substantial tax break.

According to The Pueblo Chieftain, Bacon has long been a proponent of groups that support conservation and set up the Moore Charitable Foundation in 1992 to aid their efforts. He himself has given conservation easements on two Long Island properties. I asked Dan Pike, the president of Colorado Open Lands, about Louis Bacon, and he said, “He’s probably as good a buyer as we could have hoped for.”

A closing note. Most published reports indicate that Malcolm Forbes paid $50 an acre to purchase the ranch in 1969. In 2007, his heirs sold it for more than $1,000 an acre. And that was after they had donated their record-setting conservation easement. As anyone familiar with easements knows, they limit land use and therefore lower land value. Yet the Forbes family was still able to sell the Trinchera Ranch for more than 20 times what Malcolm Forbes paid almost 40 years earlier.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.