It's a sellers market for Saskatchewan land owners

Consolidation is a word that has been floating around the cattle industry recently; however, the term is also gaining legs in the world of agricultural real estate.

June Dako and Ray Nordin, real estate agents with ReMax Bridge City Realty, say that they’ve seen a fairly significant decline in available parcels for sale over the past couple years throughout the province, something they are attributing to the consolidation of smaller farming operations.

“I’d have to say that the smaller family farms, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be, it’s getting to be bigger and bigger enterprises. And family farms that are hanging together are also getting larger and larger and larger,” says Nordin.

As of June 2022 there were approximately 210 land packages for sale, which is about a third of what Saskatchewan had listed a couple years ago when Daku and Nordin were seeing upwards of 600 land parcels available. With the decrease in supply, the duo says this undoubtedly makes the current market in the seller’s favour.

They say the cross-section of buyers is also showing some trends.

“Although it’s predominantly the bigger farmers that are expanding, but there are still some investors out there looking for buying parcels and renting to bigger to the farmers. And there’s a lot of young guys out there looking too, they want to expand and and they want to be working in farming as well, so they’ve had to expand their acres,” says Daku.

As expected with any scenario of squeezed supply, the value of land has seen a steady increase synergistic to the availability.

Albeit not all land is created equal and, depending on many factors including location and composition, dollars per acre can vary from $1750/acre all the way up to $4000/acre. Although that is a hefty variance, Daku and Nordin say both values, on the low and high end, are trending upwards and will likely continue to do so until more land becomes available throughout Saskatchewan.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | All Podcasts