The final installment of our series drawn from Mike Swan’s recent talk on buying, selling, and operating ranch real estate across the Mountain West. Catch Ask Mike Swan, Part 1: Educating Sellers and Building the Team, and Part 2: Pricing It Right and Getting Ready for Market.

What’s the market actually doing right now?

It’s softened, and there’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines. If anyone’s looked at their 401 (k) lately, it’s doing fine, so that capital hasn’t fully found its way back into real estate yet, but it will. It moves in cycles, the way it always has, and our counsel to most of our sellers right now is patience. Let’s see what next spring brings. We’re not seeing a huge volume of properties going under contract at the moment, but we expect that to shift by the second or third quarter of next year as more of that money starts moving back into real estate.

It’s not any single factor causing buyers to pause. It’s a combination — a higher interest rate environment, unrest overseas, gas prices, an election year, whatever the headlines are that week. You can never point to one specific thing; stack a few of them together, and buyers hit pause until things settle. Right now, with everything from tariffs to global instability in the news, we’re seeing exactly that. Our job isn’t to make the decision for a seller. It’s to make sure they have solid, honest information about where things stand so they can make the call themselves.

There’s been more talk about off-market sales lately. What’s your honest take?

I have some strong feelings here. A fair number of these deals, I think, come down to a seller trying to get a free read on what the market will actually pay without committing to a real process, and I’d ask whether the broker representing them is doing their best work in that scenario. Now, I’ll be the first to admit we do off-market deals ourselves when it’s a genuine fit — a former client we’re now representing as a buyer’s agent who’s in a 1031 situation, and another broker calls and says, “Mike, I’ve got a listing that’s a perfect match.” That’s a plug-and-play situation, and it makes sense.

But when a property sits off-market for a long stretch, I think it does the seller a disservice. You lose the momentum that comes from bringing something genuinely new to the market. You lose the competitive energy of other brokers knowing a listing is about to launch and lining up buyers ahead of time. It’s a real balancing act for agents right now, because we do see it happening more, and there are firms out there where it makes up the majority of their business. The question I keep coming back to is simple: are you actually getting your seller the best possible outcome by holding it back?

I do think this shifts as the market shifts. As things soften, I expect we’ll see fewer off-market deals, not more, because buyers are getting more cautious about how they move. There’s always going to be an outlier, a buyer who’s been searching for exactly this property for a long time and jumps the moment they see it but that’s the exception, not the rule.

How do you deal with sellers who just want you chasing “big money” buyers and skipping the local lookie-loos?

Vetting is on us. Every showing we set up is a financial investment on the broker’s part, especially if we’re traveling to represent a property outside our home turf, and we owe it to the seller not to put a body on the ranch just to prove we’re generating activity. We’re upfront with buyers from the start that they may not get many showings from us but the showings we do set up are with people who are genuinely qualified and already well educated about the property before they ever set foot on it.

Does social media actually sell ranches?

I’ll tell you a quick story. A few years back, right around when the show Yellowstone first came out, we listed a property over in the Big Hole Valley — mountains in the backdrop, snowcapped peaks, the Continental Divide, water, green grass, the whole picture. We put a video up on our Facebook page and it exploded. Over 1.2 million views. I thought, here come the offers.

We didn’t get a single call out of it. Not one buyer. I think it helps build brand recognition and keeps our name in front of people, but I’m not sold on social media as a tool for actually finding the high-net-worth buyer who’s going to purchase a ranch. It has a place. I just have my reservations about how much weight it really carries when it comes to closing a deal. What still works, time and again, is the tried-and-true approach — strong relationships with fellow brokers and making sure buyer’s agents feel like genuine participants in our listings, not outsiders looking in.

Swan Land Company