Farming families outbidding corporates to secure Australian farms

Australian farming families are outbidding corporate businesses to secure farmland. Experts discuss why here.

Farming families are still snapping up large Australian farms. Picture: File

FARMING families are outbidding corporate businesses to secure farmland – and they’re paying record prices.

Leading rural property agents, Danny Thomas, from LAWD, and Sam Triggs, from Inglis Rural Property, discussed the topic during The Weekly TimesVirtuAg rural property webinar this afternoon.

Mr Triggs said farming families were still very much part of the market.

“The family model is still as competitive as we have ever seen and they are outbidding institutional capital,” he said.

“We recently sold a southern NSW portfolio of seven farms and they hottest buyers were farming families. The properties had been leased to locals and they stepped in and bought them across nine different contracts.

“The price paid was 25 per cent more than this time 12 months ago.

“For locals, their land value has increased and their equity has increased. It’s really exciting to see the family farming model expanding.”

Mr Triggs said one of the reasons for the demand was that farmers were wanting to secure neighbouring properties.

Mr Thomas said if he had two offers in front of him, one from a foreign institution and one from a local buyer, he would currently recommend the local buyer to the seller.

“A local buyer is only one level of approval whereas a foreign investor has to go through the Foreign Investment Review Board.

“It still stumps me why the treasurer needs to sign off on agriculture land when it’s sold to a foreign investor.

“It’s an incredibly slow process”.

Mr Thomas said prices were “absolutely red hot”.

“We are seeing record prices made for almost every new campaign,” he said. “Demand is extraordinary”.

A combination of low interest rates, strong commodity prices and good rainfall are some of the key reasons why prices for farms have risen so high.

“We are in uncharted territory,” Mr Thomas said.

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