Nearly $10 million was paid for two Wyoming ranches totaling some 9,200 acres. Both are working cattle ranches featuring noteworthy homes.

Southeast Wyoming
An area investor who previously acquired about 10,000 acres between Laramie and Cheyenne bolstered assets by purchasing the neighboring 4,051-acre Shimmerhorn Ranch.

“It sold right close to the asking price of $3.65 million,” says James Rinehart, a partner in the brokerage firm Western United Realty.

The per-acre asking price was $900.

Two creeks flow through the property, which features rolling grasslands, pockets of timber and scenic rock outcrops. Additional appeals were an exceptionally crafted, 2,800-square-foot home and an adjacent 1,000-square-foot guest cabin.

“The sale price doesn’t convey any kind of return on investment from an agricultural standpoint,” Rinehart notes. “The buyers wanted to enlarge their existing ranch and enlarge their overall investment portfolio.”

Though Rinehart says the buyers don’t have to make a living off the ranch, they help a cattle producer do just that by renting out summer pasture.

“The pastures are leased out to a large cattle operator who trucks in yearlings from all over the region.”

The previous owners acquired the Shimmerhorn as a recreation property and also leased out pastures for yearlings. They put the ranch on the market after deciding to move from southeast Wyoming to Boise, Idaho.

The Shimmerhorn attracted about a dozen potential buyers over two years before selling in July 2015.

North-central Wyoming
The 5,157-acre Horn Creek Ranch between Buffalo and Kaycee was sold by heirs of an estate to a ranch family from California for $6 million—or $1,163 per acre.

The original asking price was $7.25 million.

The buyers sold their Northern California ranch to a winery and acquired the Horn Creek through an IRS 1031 exchange, says Jack Kavanaugh, a broker with Ranch Marketing Associates.

The ranch came with an extraordinary, 5,800-square-foot home, a very nice 4,000-square-foot ranch manager’s home, lots of improvements and an incredibly high-volume, warm-water artisan well.

The free-flowing well produces about 1,000 gallons of water per minute, supplying the homes, landscaping, seven reservoirs, seven stock tanks, a gravity-fed side roll irrigation system and a 5,000-gallon storage tank that feeds eight miles of underground pipe.

The ranch, listed by Fuller Western Real Estate, can annually produce up to 800 tons of hay, along with 300 mother cows plus replacement heifers, bulls and horses.

More than two miles of Horn Creek passes through the ranch, and six miles of Crazy Woman Creek traverses the property.

“The family very much liked the Buffalo and Kaycee areas and the type of people who live there. They were also attracted to the cattle country and liked the fact that Wyoming has no state income tax,” Kavanaugh says.