Vast Texas ranch hits market for $18.5M

They say everything is bigger in Texas. But an 8,500-acre ranch is very big, even for the Lone Star State. Likewise, so is its asking price of $18.5 million.

Nineteen MIle Ranch, listed by Foster Farm & Ranch, is in the Texas Hill Country’s Uvalde County northwest of San Antonio. Its western boundary is the Nueces River, but it’s named after Nineteen Mile Creek, which runs directly through it.

The ranch’s topography is typical of the region, with dramatic limestone cliffs, rocky river bottoms and a spring that runs through part of the property. It’s used for recreation — primarily hunting and fishing — and has a three-bedroom, two-bathroom stone lodge on a cliff overlooking the property.

Nineteen MIle Ranch is part of the watershed for the Edwards Aquifer, a significant water source for cities, farms, and industries in the Texas Hill Country. A conservation easement held by the city of San Antonio was placed on the property in 2007.

Wealthy buyers across the U.S. have been on the hunt for luxury ranches — all land, no cattle, but lots of fish and wildlife — since the height of the pandemic, when many fled large cities for less-populated realms. Texas cashed in on this boom, as did Montana, Colorado and other western states. While longtime local farm and ranch brokers held their own in Texas, national brokers such Douglas Elliman opened special divisions for big land sales.

However, the national trend could be cooling. Tom Cruise, who sold his 320-acre ranch in Telluride, Colorado, for $40 million in May, is among the celebrities who moved on to more crowded pastures. And on an even grander scale, fashion designer Tom Ford ditched his sizable ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, listed for $48 million, in January.

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