LJWorld.com

Pittsburg — Thanks to a hefty appetite for hunting and fishing, rugged, brush-filled land in southeast Kansas that was once valued at $300 an acre is now on the market for more than $3,000 an acre.

"If you love to hunt and fish, you'd be hard pressed to find a better piece of property than this," said Brad Harris, as he toured 900-plus acres near Pittsburg. "It's seriously some of the best in the nation."

The land, now called Coal Ground Ranch, is one of many Kansas parcels to enjoy a richly increased value because of hunting and fishing.

The demand for recreational land for hunting and fishing has changed the way people look at rural properties.

"Not many years ago we called a real brushy pasture a wasteland," said Dave Sundgren, an El Dorado real estate agent and appraiser. "Now we call them recreational land, and the price has gone up to where it costs more than the best farm ground or grazing land."

Haves and have-nots

In a state where only 3 percent of the land is publicly owned, and permission to access private ground is hard to find, some fear the trend may push all but the wealthy from the fields.

The demand for recreational land for hunting and fishing has changed the way people look at rural properties. About any piece of land with enough brush and water to attract wildlife has become a coveted commodity.

Mark Morrow, a Wichita real estate agent specializing in rural recreational properties, said that about five years ago it was easy to find land that sold for $400 to $600 an acre. Now the same land goes for $1,000 to $1,600 an acre.

That means some land values may have increased 300 percent in five years.

"It all depends on how deery it looks," Morrow said. "It seems everybody who likes the outdoors is wanting recreational land."

Mike Disario of Georgia-based OEI Properties said recreational properties are bringing top rural dollar nationwide as people try to beat the crowd to own their own pieces of paradise. In extreme cases, his company has seen some land in other states sell for $200 one year and $2,000 a few years later.

Urban sprawl into once-prime recreational areas is helping to drive the demand and the prices. Disario and Morrow said an increasingly urban and suburbanized society with dwindling rural contacts is also a driving factor.

Disario's firm has about $250 million in recreational land holdings for sale in about 12 states, most of them in the prairie or Rocky Mountain regions.

"People look at something in Kansas that sells for $1,000 an acre, even though the locals think it's worth about $300 an acre, and they want to buy all that they can," he said. "There are a lot of people with nest eggs in this country who can easily come up with half or a million dollars, even if they have to do it with a couple of other guys."

John Wildin, a Hutchinson-based real estate agent specializing in large rural properties, agreed that even with today's relatively high-demand prices, Kansas rural properties are a bargain and good investment for many out-of-state buyers.

More than half of Wildin's clients are interested in a property's recreational possibilities.

Bleak future

But average-income resident hunters are paying a heavy toll.

Drew McCartney, of Gorham, spent most of 50 years with nearly unlimited hunting lands in central Kansas.

Over the past five to 10 years, he's seen his hunting grounds shrink as they have been bought for recreation or leased. He wonders how much longer he'll be able to find places for himself to hunt. And he fears for the sporting future of his grandchildren.

"Right now it's pretty hard for me to show them any kind of promise for the future unless they own some ground," McCartney said. "And it's pretty hard for a 16-year-old to buy some ground.

"The way things are going, they may never be able to afford good hunting ground. I'm scared for them, and I'm very scared for the future of hunting. This isn't good."