The Waggoner Ranch – the world’s most expensive estate

It sits on a surface bigger than Manhattan and is on sale now for USD 725 M, a record price in history for an estate. Sprawling on 510,000 acres, The Waggoner covers six counties in Northern Texas. It is a historically valuable estate, found in 1849 by Dan Waggoner, a prosperous cattle baron, and many native stone houses can be seen across it.

Since the ranch witnessed the days of the Wild West settling, the realtors say The Waggoner falls within “super asset class”, akin to selling the “Statue of Liberty” of the cowboy culture, and are hoping to attract a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or oil tycoon. As a matter of fact, there are now more than 1,000 wells pumping thousands of barrels of oil a year after the family struck oil in the early 1900’s. Still, the land has not been fully explored for its mineral resources.

The ranch also has two main compounds, hundreds of homes, about 20 cowboy camps, hundreds of quarter-horses, thousands of heads of cattle, and 30,000 acres of cultivated land.

Despite the high price, the realtors who seek to sell the most expensive estate in the world say there’s been a real interest on the market in the ranch in Northern Texas. „It is an extremely rare piece of property, not only because of its individual attributes but you likely simply cannot buy this amount of contiguous ranch-land under one fence anywhere else in the world. Certainly there are none, however large, that have the exact qualities, history and potential upside of this property”, says one of them.

It has gone on sale afte decades long family feud between the Waggoner heirs. The family agreed to list the estate after the court said it was considering ordering an auction of the assets.

But locals fear the estate will end up in the property of a profit-minded tycoon who will neglect the historic value The Waggoner has been carrying for more than 150 years.