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Rich Helping the Land - Ennis, Madison Valley, Madison River

By: Scott McMillion
Publication: Bozeman Daily Chronicle
Date: April 18, 2008

Roger Lang is trying a new approach to conservation. Bring in more millionaires. Cluster them up. Give them room to play, but keep their impacts low. Teach them how to act. Use their money to conserve more land.

Lang is no stranger to big money or big ideas in conservation. After making a fortune in the software industry, be bought the Sun Ranch here 10 years ago. It’s a stunningly beautiful chunk of Montana, stretching from the banks of the Madison River to the rim of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. He owns 19,500 acres here and leases another 7,000.

When he bought the place from action-movie star Steven Seagal, it was in rough shape, weedy and neglected. But Lang set to work, applying big ideas to a big landscape, and trying to be a model for coexistence between cattle and predators, notably wolves and grizzly bears.

He’s had successes and failures, but maintains he’s learned from both and that he’s not giving up.

Now he’s pressing ahead with a new model: conservation subdivision. If he can make it work, he hopes to put 1 million acres into conservation over the next decade, using a market-driven approach.

* His marketing manager, Adam DeFanti, uses terms like “blended value market” and “double bottom line,” to describe the focus on both economics and the environment, but here’s the essence: Lang is offering 10 carefully selected home lots on the ranch, listed at prices ranging from $5 million to $8 million. Beyond that, no more lots will ever be sold. Existing or pending conservation easements will make sure of that.

In addition to the house lots, the owners and their heirs will have perpetual recreational access to the entire ranch. They can hunt, fish, hike, camp or work with cows, if they choose. But they don’t have to fix fence, pull calves at 3 a.m. or manage employees.

“It’s like owning a great ranch without any of the headaches,” Lang said. Even if he dies or sells the overall ranch, the deal remains in place, bound by easements that protect the small-parcel owners from blocked access or further development.

With the proceeds, Lang plans to buy more ranches and repeat the model of selling a few homes to finance the preservation of key ecological properties, “places that are in harm’s way from sprawl.”

To make the model work, he said, the conservation must be genuine and not lip service.

“There’s a lot of greenwashing going on” in Montana, he said.

MODEL FOR THE CONSCIENTIOUS RICH

The project, called the Sun Ranch Settlement, has already started. Three lots have sold.

Lang also recently purchased the 7,200-acre Schroeder Ranch south of Missoula, one of the last big working ranches in that area and a key buffer between the sprawl of southern Missoula and the northern Bitterroot Valley. It also provides a link in a wildlife travel corridor between major wildlands in Montana and Idaho.

That ranch -- which was listed for $25 million -- has been subdivided, on paper, into 200-plus parcels since the 1970s. Lang said he’ll sell 15 to 17 parcels, build a high-end eco-lodge similar to the one on the Sun Ranch, and put a conservation easement on the rest of it.

Then he’ll buy another ranch and do it again.

“That’s the model I’m going to pursue,” he said.

And he’s not plopping house lots on the map willy-nilly, he said.

He’s hired biologists and other experts to survey the Sun Ranch, documenting habitat for everything from boreal toads to wolverines. He’s platted elk and antelope migration routes, bird habitat and cultural sites. All the houses will be kept away from those things.

Each new homeowner is restricted to a 3-acre building site and the total square footage of all structures, including homes and outbuildings on a single lot cannot exceed 8,500 square feet. No fences will be allowed. Nor will any off-road vehicles.

Cattle grazing will continue, as will limited public hunting, at least for now. Lang’s non-profit group, the Sun Ranch Institute, will teach owners how to get along with and appreciate the wildlife.

“You can build a green building,” Lang said. “But if you ruin the elk migration route, how is that green?”

The lots are expensive, Lang agreed. For the same price, you could buy a sizable ranch or a slopeside mansion at the Yellowstone Club.

Eight of 10 people with the money and desire for a vacation place in Montana will be looking for their own ranch or a resort lot, he said.

“This isn’t for everybody,” he said. “This model works for the conscientious wealthy person.”

But it might work in some places. Lang says it will work here, and provide a model for other landowners.

“We live in a market-driven economy and we need a market-driven system,” he said.

IS THERE A MARKET?

Randy Carpenter is a land-use planner in Bozeman at The Sonoran Institute, which advocates low-impact development.

“To be truly green, a development is done in town, where the infrastructure already exists,” he said. “But we know (development) is coming to rural areas and that’s a fact. And when it is, we hope it’s done in the most sensitive way. And from what I know, Roger’s is being done in the most sensitive way.”

Installing a conservation easement is a critical component, Lang said.

“That way, the buyer knows I don’t have a phase two or phase three (of future developments) up my sleeve,” he said.

And Lang’s model could be replicated by other landowners, Carpenter said.

Few properties offer the natural amenities or the vast open spaces that the Sun Ranch provides, but there are a lot of beautiful places threatened by development. If somebody wanted to sell four lots on a square mile with outstanding views, they aren’t likely to get $5 million apiece for them, he said.

“But is it a $500,000 property?” Carpenter asked.

Maybe.

And selling four expensive properties could provide as much profit and a lot less hassle to a landowner as a “cookie cutter,” subdivision, he said. Plus, it lets the majority of the land remain in agriculture or wildlife habitat.

That’s an idea held by Madison Valley rancher John Crumley, who, along with two other ranchers, owns a 6,000-acre mountain parcel west of Ennis. It’s already protected by a conservation easement that allows three homes to be built on small acreages. It’s got trees and sage and wildlife and “views to kill for,” he said.

So he’s tried to sell those lots with newspaper advertisements, offering a building site with full recreational access to the rest of the property. It’s a way, he said, “to capitalize on being land rich.”

“We were going to raise some capital and just keep ranching,” he said. “You’d have all the amenities of a large ranch without buying the whole thing, and you wouldn’t have to hire managers.”

He offered the parcels at $3 million to $5 million, but hasn’t had any takers so far. He said he got lots of calls, but found a lot of sticker shock.

“People aren’t used to that idea yet,” he said. Most wealthy buyers like the idea of owning their own ranch.

“That’s what’s in vogue now,” Crumley said.

But if somebody wants access to lots of acres, buying just a few of them might do the trick.

A scan of ranches offered by Bozeman area Realtors shows that you can spend several times that much money and get just a few hundred acres.

But vogues change all the time, especially with an ongoing shortage of qualified ranch managers, people who can not only run cows, but foster elk habitat, restore a trout stream and deal with the tastes of urban visitors.

“As traditional ranch management evolves toward resource management, the pool of qualified candidates shrinks,” land brokers Hall and Hall said in a recent newsletter.

“I think it’s going to catch on,” Crumley said of the shared-ownership concept. “It’s maybe a little ahead of its time. But Roger’s been able to get it started. Word travels pretty fast in those circles.”

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