Sprawling $128M ranch stretching across 2 states sells days after listing

A cattle empire spanning two states and nearly 88,000 acres has changed hands for a massive sum — and it barely had time to sit on the market.
Freeman Family Ranches, an 87,953-acre spread stretching across the North Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, sold for nearly its full asking price of $127.7 million after interested buyers began circling right after it hit the market.
The deal closed within a month. Realtor.com first broke news of the sale.
Its sprawling scale is difficult to picture. For comparison’s sake, it’s roughly six times the land area of Manhattan.
For four generations, the land belonged to the Freeman ranching family, with the earliest deed dating back to 1929 and the rest of the massive holding assembled piece by piece over the decades that followed.
According to listing broker Chad Dugger of Hall and Hall, the ranches were held under a partnership whose operating agreement had expired, prompting the family to liquidate the asset.
Three separate ranches — the Anchor D, the Coldwater and the Frisco — made up the land holding, each with its own identity and purpose, run together as one seamless operation.
It was all combined into what brokers describe as a genuine turnkey enterprise, the rare kind of property that generates income from day 1 rather than requiring years of development.
No livestock changed hands as part of the sale, though historically the ranch was run as a yearling operation carrying around 8,500 young animals at a time.
“You either run mother cows year-round or you run yearlings seasonally,” Dugger told Realtor.com.
“Freeman Ranches was a rare offering, three diverse, well-managed ranches operated as one cohesive unit, the kind of property that simply does not come around every day,” Dugger said in a separate statement to The Post.
Dugger declined to name the buyer but described him as a top 100 national landowner with deep roots in the livestock business.
“He is buying it to ranch,” he said. “Just like his family has for decades. And to expand his land holdings.”
According to Dugger, the Freeman family took comfort in knowing the land would remain in the hands of another Texas ranching family rather than being broken apart.
“It’s always nice when a seller is attached to a place as long as this family has to find somebody who will treat it and use it the way they’ve always treated and used it,” he said. “The buyer will continue the legacy.”
Scarcity is a big part of why the sale moved so fast. Large ranches in this stretch of Texas are frequently purchased and subdivided, and once that happens, the land rarely gets reassembled into a single holding again.
“It’s becoming more and more rare to have these size transactions,” said Dugger, who co-listed the property alongside Sam Middleton of Chas S. Middleton and Son. “The number of large ranches, particularly in this area of Texas, are sometimes bought and divided. Once that happens, they are almost never put together again. So your inventory of places this size is reduced.”
With a quarter century in land dealings, Dugger calls it one of the largest ranches he has ever sold.