For anyone looking to grow their land holdings — and maybe some organic strawberries, too — Chad Foster Jr. has a property to show you.
The veteran land broker has the listing near Interstate 37 and FM 536, a 380-acre organic fruit and vegetable farm. The property, which lies just south of San Antonio in Atascosa County, is available to commercial real estate buyers, not just farmers.
The asking price is $8 million, a little over $21,000 per acre.
The property has a 14,500-square-foot packing facility with cold storage, office space and loading docks. Some 300 acres of the land are used to grow crops, with a mix of trees, peach orchards and strawberry bushes.
Since 2009, the property has belonged to Texas Farm Group LP, which is connected to Frank Davis’ Great Taste of Texas, a fruit and vegetable distributor out of Lakeway.
Foster, whose Foster Farm and Ranch operates out of Uvalde, was born in Eagle Pass, where his father was a three-term mayor. He owns several other businesses in the area.
Land sales have reached a critical juncture in South Texas, according to a report from the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Prices hit an all-time high in the first quarter of the year, reaching $6,341 per acre, an increase of 10.8 percent year-over-year.
Meanwhile, sale dollar volume plummeted by 55 percent in the same span, completely erasing the pandemic-era jump. Just under 20,000 acres sold that quarter, the lowest amount on record since 1966.
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“This region is likely at or very near a trough in sales volume,” the report reads.
The numbers across the state weren’t much better. The number of acres sold fell 43 percent to 246,950, while the number of sales fell by a third to 3,573.