Business Development
Listen to the Property Douglas Cutting Vice President Garden & Gun Land Some years back, a long walk in a fallow field changed my career path forever. Peanut hulls, gobbler tracks, and flint flakes dotted the riversilt loam around my boots. It was March, right when Northeastern Carolina starts to warm. The soft dirt slowed me down, and I accepted it as a vehicle to better observation — of crows raising cane in the hardwoods, of deer crashing through a cypress slough, of wood duck squeals, of the muddy Roanoke River hissing along cut banks. This property was four-hundred acres of fields and hardwoods set to be developed into twenty acre strips, river to road, like someone cutting tenderloin into steaks with their eyes shut. I was working for the developer, fresh from a long jaunt as equal parts boat captain, writer, rod and reel wholesaler, and boat salesman. I was young and ready to make some money. The rush was on for waterfront land, and this developer found a niche cutting up river and marsh-front farms in off-radar towns. But surely not this farm, I thought, bending over to pick up the base of a quartz spear point.
in scratching plan A and trading off for the ultimate end user. Each element saw its higher and better use by keeping the property intact as a joint equity hunting property. Strangely enough, the real credit goes to the developer. Instead of banging his head against the wall, he was willing to take a new approach. He listened to me and he really listened to the land and let it guide him toward a better solution. Here was a guy in a Tommy Bahama shirt, with his loafers on the desk, making a quick decision based on a very sophisticated hybrid of economics and land stewardship. In that sense, a huge part of land listing and marketing is letting the property be what it is rather than forcing it into a box or flaunting it for something it’s not—which means that someone, most likely a land owner, may have to concede their original vision. It sounds corny, but it’s critical as a good broker to “feel” the land and how it fits with wildlife and the surrounding neighborhood.
As luck would have it, the marketing plan didn’t work. The grand opening had few attendees. Only one of the twenty lots was reserved. Several of the migratory investors cited dissatisfaction that the only place to buy a snack was a Red Apple gas station thirty miles away. The developer, who had picked up on my outdoor affliction and who did not often put on boots, called me into his office. “What should we do?” He asked me, having never sold fewer than all his lots in a single day. He was on seriously foreign turf. “I could sell the whole thing to someone for a hunting place,” I said. “Hunting? Would they pay me enough?” He asked, chewing on a giant cigar. “I need to get one point two out.” “Yes sir,” I said, crossing both sets of fingers in my pockets. “Well, then, you got your first listing,” he said. It’s a good story for me, one that hits home because it finally turned my avocation into a vocation that could put food on the table. The “listing” moment and the drive home from closing were like lightning bolts hitting pine bark – burning out all the job doubts I’d had until then. But many years later, looking back, I see new things –so many other critical lessons learned from that one sale that had very little to do with me. I sold the farm to a sporting investor who had a mind for everything from deer, to dirt, to conservation, to equity-share sporting clubs. You could say that we “rescued” or changed the life course of that four-hundred-acre farm forever, but I believe that the farm did the work. Location, habitat, proximity to water and wildlife corridors, soil, floodplain, and agriculture – all of these things played specific roles
TerraFirma TerraFirma
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