Owner of NFL’s Rams buying the Waggoner Ranch

The historic W.T Waggoner Ranch, which stretches over six counties and 520,000 acres northwest of Wichita Falls, has been sold to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire sports mogul who owns the National Football League’s Rams, which he recently moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles.

Terms for the deal were not disclosed. But the working ranch, which includes thousands of cattle, hundreds of horses and oil wells, had been listed with an asking price of $725 million.

Bernard Uechtritz, who led the team that handled the sale for Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty, said Kroenke’s offer won out during a yearlong sales process that elicited some 900 inquiries and 50 qualified potential buyers. He said six finalists put up $15 million each to make presentations late last year at meetings in downtown Fort Worth at the Omni Hotel and the law offices of Jackson Walker.

“Mr. Kroenke was absolutely the perfect buyer,” Uechtritz said. “He is a serious rancher; this is not just a play thing for him. He has a robust ranching enterprise.”

Kroenke, who is married to an heiress of the Wal-Mart family fortune, is one of the wealthiest owners in professional sports and also owns ranches in Montana, Wyoming, Arizona and British Columbia. The Waggoner Ranch went on the market in 2014 after a judge ordered a sale to end more than 20 years of family litigation.

“This is an incredible opportunity and an even greater responsibility,” Kroenke said in a statement released by the Waggoner family and its representatives. “We are honored to assume ownership of the Waggoner — a true Texas and American landmark.”

Kroenke recently decided to move his pro football team to a privately financed $1.8 billion stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Along with the Rams, he owns the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids and two-thirds of the English Premier League soccer club Arsenal. Kroenke’s fortune is estimated at $6.2 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

The Waggoner is the largest U.S. ranch within one fence, measuring 800 square miles. The King Ranch, based in South Texas, has more acreage spread over several parcels. Briggs Freeman Sotheby said the deal represents the largest ranch sale by acreage and price in American history.

Robbie Briggs, president and CEO of Briggs Freeman, said the property attracted interest from around the globe including Korea, the Middle East, China and South America.

The Waggoner property is bigger than the area of Los Angeles and New York City combined. The asking price was more than four times the biggest publicly known sum fetched by a U.S. ranch, $175 million for a Colorado spread in 2007.

With 6,800 head of cattle, the Waggoner is also one of the 20 largest cattle ranches in the U.S. and is known worldwide for its quarter horses, which number 500. The ranch also has 1,000 oil wells, 30,000 acres of cropland, and an abundance of deer, quail, feral hogs, waterfowl and other wildlife.

The Waggoner has been owned by the same family almost as long as Texas been a state. A judge in Vernon, a town of about 11,000 near the ranch, ordered a sale in 2014 ending more than 20 years of litigation between branches of the Waggoner family that couldn’t agree on what to do with the property.

The ranch was developed by cattle and horse baron W.T. Waggoner, son of Dan Waggoner, who started buying Texas acreage around 1850. By the 20th century, oil had been discovered on the ranch and the Waggoner reverse-triple-D brand was a Texas icon. Trainloads of spectators came to watch President Theodore Roosevelt hunt wolves on the property. Will Rogers, the famous American humorist of the 1920s and early 1930s, visited frequently, sometimes playing polo.

W.T. Waggoner eventually moved the ranch headquarters to Vernon but remained a fixture in Decatur, where his father had built a 16-room mansion, and Fort Worth. Waggoner built Arlington Downs Racetrack in Arlington and a 20-story office building in downtown Fort Worth that became headquarters for XTO Energy. Waggoner died in Fort Worth in 1934.

Staff writer Steve Kaskovich contributed to this report, which includes material from Bloomberg News and the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published February 9, 2016 at 2:01 PM with the headline "Owner of NFL’s Rams buying the Waggoner Ranch."