The Crestone Eagle, August 2007:

Weiss Ranch sells for nearly $2.8M
by David Nicholas

Watching the hired hands erecting the fancy black and white signs of auctioneer J.P. King that advertised the sale of the Weiss Ranch, just east of Moffat on County Rd T, was not your ordinary property auction. And it wasn’t.

In the end, after an intense last-minute bidding war, Kyle Grote of Columbus, OH won over San Luis Valley rancher Gary Boyce’s associate, the Honorable William O. Brisben, the U.S. Representative to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund and Cincinnati real estate developer. He bid to buy the ranch at $1,070 an acre. Adding a 10% buyer’s premium to the price for the 2,405 acre ranch comes out to $2,830,605, and it doesn’t include the auctioneer’s fees.

Mr. Grote who owns Enlightenment Studios, a video editing business in Columbus, said he intends to move his family out here in the future, and said he bought the ranch to “keep the water from going someplace else and that somebody had to stand up and do the right thing.”

It was the general consensus that, given the extensive surface and ground water rights which came with the ranch, Mr. Grote got himself a very good bargain. The value of water rights alone, probably senior rights on the Rito Alto Creek and definitely senior rights on San Luis Creek, along with adjudicated wells for irrigation, probably are somewhere close to the sale price for the ranch. But the sale of the ranch was not pitched that way, although many were concerned that a water developer would purchase the ranch.

The sale of the ranch comes after it was put on the market about two years ago with an asking price of $2.3M. Without any takers, the Weiss family brought in the Arkansas firm of J.P. King who auctions high-end property, and who would attract buyers from around the country.

From around the country they came from afar as Florida, Tennessee, Texas and California. To bid folks needed to bring a cashier’s check for $50,000 and register prior to the auction. Out of the crowd of about sixty people, about ten to fifteen—including several Baca residents—were actually in the game.

Texas hold’em five card poker has nothing on this, when the auction began and it was pandemonium. The pressure on bidders was enormous with J.P. King runners at the bidder’s side yelling above the auctioneer to try to get them to up their bids.

The auction had two rounds. Round 1 offered the ranch up in seven parcels with about 250-460 acres in each. Bidders were able to bid on the parcels and if the bid was the highest it was locked in on the parcel the buyer wanted. Once each of the parcels had a buyer recorded for it, the auction went to Round 2 or the “multi-par round”.

This round allowed bidders interested in buying the ranch as an entity or for previous successful bidders to try and outbid to get the other parcels. There were four buyers interested in buying the ranch as an entity and the initial bid for the ranch was at $650 an acre, Mr. Brisben holding the bid. Bidders on individual parcels needed to better that price on average in order to remain in play, and the individual parcels were valued much higher than the overall ranch.

But the play for the entire ranch had come from the Texas buyer who bid $720 an acre, with Mr. Brisben bidding back at $750. As the bids on individual parcels topped off better than the average ranch price, in a decisive move, Mr. Brisben bid $850 an acre, and then Mr. Grote, who had been sitting next to Crestone realtor Wooddora Eisenhauer throughout the auction and had bid on some of the earlier parcels, made his move and in ten minutes the price was up to $1,070 in $10 and $20 an acre increments. Mr. Grote being victorious.

The sale brought about an end to speculation about whether Mr. Boyce, a prospective water developer, would purchase the ranch. The Weiss family had sworn in 1995, at a public meeting Mr. Boyce had called, that they would never sell to a water developer. While Mr. Boyce assisted Mr. Brisben in assessing the prices at the auction, he did not bid. Mr. Brisben was not available for comment after the auction.

As the auctioneer said there hasn’t been anything quite like this in the last 40 years and possibly nothing like in the next 100 years. It’s the stuff of short stories.

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