I stumbled upon an excellent piece on AgMates on the history of many channel country families and management of sheep and cattle stations in the far south-western corner of Queensland – the country south and west of Quilpie. Well worth a read.
In the AgMates article, David Edwards, Quilpie Mayor, is quoted frequently. One of his most depressing but unfortunately true observations, that doesn’t just apply to the Quilpie, Eromanga and Thargomindah region is:
“The country is being bought up by wealthy cattlemen from from central and North QLD in particular. They are putting 2-3 properties together as low cost breeding factories. Families don’t come, you have those 2-3 families gone replaced by a caretaker running the waters. They bring in contractors to do the mustering. You don’t need a lot of infrastructure except fences and water to run those operations.”
“In my lifetime this is the biggest change in this community ever. Families and their kids are leaving, mining is booming at Eromanga but with fly-in-fly-out staff and big mining companies we don’t get much out of it.”
In more than twenty years of poking around cattle stations, it has indeed been true that absentee owners have increasingly bought up neighbouring properties, often running them with just one caretaker/borerunner whereas before there was one family living on each place. Or staff are reduced from the bare minimum sociable quantity of about 8 young people on very remote properties to just several people, then the owners wonder why they can’t attract and keep young staff. (Hello? Would these owners have stayed working out on a station several hours drive from the nearest tiny town, when there is only several social events during the year, if that, and there’s only one or two other people of the same age for company?) This causes large quantities of money to head down the drain due to permanent understaffing, high staff turnover/low morale and increased stuff-ups due to new or inexperienced employees. Theoretically these owners run more profitable businesses by squeezing a profit out of them however I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, especially in the long term. Too often such owners depend on ultimately profiting by making a big capital gain by selling, but if prices don’t continue to rise willy-nilly, that plan comes unstuck in a sometimes spectacular fashion (the finances collapse like a pack of cards). But perhaps I just don’t understand people who can buy a going concern that families have spent years building up, to let it go to rack and ruin because there is no-one living on the place permanently. How can these absentee owners lie straight in bed at night, when they are leaving assets in their care, in worse shape, when they’ve sucked the sap out of them? What joy and satisfaction do they get out of helping to ruin communities, by increasing the downward spiral of de-population (thus effecting educational options for the children and social opportunities for the adults, and services and facilities for everyone).
A friend in rural real estate commented yesterday that a number of lender-forced sales are up and coming. In recent years too many people have paid too much for their pastoral land, and discovered too late that the business they bought can’t generate enough net income to pay the interest bill (whoops, forgot to do a budget before they bought). Receivers are moving in despite the relatively low interest rates at present, and seasons and prices that haven’t been too bad, in relative terms.
However while there are fools waiting to be parted with their money, prices probably won’t drop much. I don’t entirely agree with David Edwards that it is ‘wealthy cattlemen from central and northern Queensland’ doing the damage. I think it is buyers from southern Queensland and capital cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, who are frequently doing the significant buying, underpinning the price of large pastoral properties and preventing valuations from dropping down to more realistic levels (some smart property agent tells these city businessmen and professionals that there’s a bush bargain to be had, and they can’t resist the temptation to become an overnight ‘cattle baron’. Just because someone has climbed up the corporate tree doesn’t mean they can’t make spectacular mistakes on the business front, especially when the heart is involved rather than the head).
As someone said to me a few years ago. ‘Do you know how you end up a millionaire on Cape York? Start off as a multi-millionaire.’ I’m still laughing hysterically at the Queensland Government’s expenditure of $4.62 million on Cape York’s Strathmay station. It would be really funny if it wasn’t my taxes that Anna Bligh has so happily squandered. The Strathmay station owners, John and Kelli Kozicka, more than doubled their money (probably more like trebled, because it was sold bare) – not bad for 6 years of ownership. So yes government idiots are also to blame for affecting rural property prices.
Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Pastoral companies, Rural properties for sale and ownership