Elk Permits for Sale, Unit 51, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico
Landowner Permits for Unit 51, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico
The ranch was allotted 6 Unit Wide Elk Permits for the 2008 Season. For information regarding purchase of 2009 permits, please contact Dale Heinemann 505-920-3464.
Do Elk Permits Make a Difference in Land Values?
Why is Gerald Peters, Santa Fe businessman and major supporter of Governor Bill Richardson, spending millions for New Mexico elk hunting ranches and permits? Because he’s smart as Hell and it’s an excellent business.
Peters recently offered $15,000,000.00 for the Azotea Ranch near Chama. If he is successful in that purchase, he will merge this ranch with his adjoining Quinlan Ranch for a total of 34,000 acres of prime elk hunting property. To give perspective to the value of the elk hunting permits, Peters is offereing Azotea $1,250,000.00 just for the permits for five years.
Peters obviously feels he can turn a profit on this investment. His present hunting lodge at the Quinlan Ranch gets up to $12,500.00 per bull elk hunt. At that rate he only needs to sell 20 bull hunts per year on the Azotea Ranch for five years to get his investment back. Since the Azotea Ranch currently receives 52 bull permits per year, in addition to 22 cow permits and 24 bow permits, it would seem that he could reap a gross margin of $2,000,000.00 in five years on the bull permits alone. The cow and bow permits could exceed that amount.
New Mexico State University agricultural economist Allen Torell has studied New Mexico's land ranch values for two decades. He's chronicled and studied changes during the last decade indicating the impact of non-agricultural uses on land values. Here is what he says about hunting:
Hunting Leases
Besides off-farm jobs, Torell says ranchers are finding other value-added ways to make money on their operations. One option is capitalizing on hunting leases.
In his work, Torell looked at the value of wildlife income on the ranch and how it affected sale price. Of the 500 ranches studied, 125 had wildlife income. Some ranches had elk permits for hunting; others had antelope and/or deer permits.
“New Mexico has a unique program where the state's wildlife department gives wildlife permits to ranchers for improving wildlife habitat on their deeded land,” Torell says. The benefit only applies to deeded lands, not public lands where ranchers hold grazing rights.
For example, if a deeded-land ranch in northern New Mexico has a $6,000 bull elk permit, it can add as much as $127,000 to the value of the ranch.
“Just that one permit,” Torell adds. “And the coefficient on wildlife income was about three times the coefficient for livestock income.”
USDA's 2002 agricultural census showed 28,016 operations in the U.S. provide recreational services — hunting, fishing, camping, etc. — generating a total of $202 million in revenue. That's an average of $7,220/operation of additional income each year across the U.S.
