Tim Hammond of Hammond Realty, 30 years in farmland, returns six months after he told the room the market was splitting. His read now is that the Saskatchewan farmland market is not weakening, it is maturing. Listings are fewer but bigger, the dollar value of farmland listed is at a ten-year high, and affordability and access to capital are the real limits. With Dan Aberhart, a live poll and a few questions from the room, he covers how families can get a transfer done, and the meeting he now holds for himself, with his accountants, lawyer, lender and wealth advisors at one table.
Fewer listings than last year. Bigger packages. The highest dollar value of farmland listed for sale in ten years. In April, Tim Hammond told the room the market was splitting, with good land still climbing and average land moving sideways. Six months later he is back with a different word for what he sees: not a weakening market so much as a maturing one, with supply and demand closer to balance than they have been in years.
Tim, of Hammond Realty, has been in farmland for thirty years. In this live session with Dan Aberhart he takes the questions on people’s minds: what affordability does to the next decision, why access to capital came out on top when the room was polled, and how a transfer of around $50 billion in farmland, mostly inside families, actually gets done.
What’s Inside
• Why Tim calls this market maturing and not weakening, and what that looks like in practice: sideways, a little up, a little down
• How listings can fall in number and still hit a ten-year high in dollar value, and why a September to August crop year is the fairer way to count
• Why he takes technical analysis of land values seriously if it is read over a hundred years, and what a 20 percent pullback would mean for lenders in his view (he is not predicting one)
• Land as an input or as an investment: how a producer buying to produce thinks differently from a buyer chasing an asset
• Why a 5,000 acre package was easier to sell than a 500 acre one three years ago, and why that has reversed
• What the room said in a live poll: more people looking to buy or transfer than to sell, and financing as the biggest obstacle
• Why a succession plan is one thing and carrying it out is another, and the quarterback role an advisor can play
• The Hammond Huddle: one meeting with the accountant, lawyer, lender, wealth advisor and insurance advisor, the dangers, opportunities and strengths exercise, and the risks no one had named, from digital passwords to an unfinished to-do list
• When to list (off the combine), why auctions suit only some packages, and why pasture demand is rising
Dan opens on the numbers: fewer listings, bigger farm packages, and a ten-year high in the dollar value of farmland listed, close to double with the Monette Farms sale included. Tim explains how he counted by crop year and why this looks like a maturing market. He covers affordability, the technical analysis work he and Trent did on land values, and the difference between buying land as an input and as an asset.
The room is polled twice: what people are trying to do (buy, sell, transfer) and what stands in the way. Financing comes out on top. Tim says that for families the hard part is carrying a plan out, and he describes the Hammond Huddle he held in September for his own family and advisors, with his kids in the room.
The session closes with audience questions on irrigated and pasture land, which regions are active, when to list, and auctions.
Key Topics
• Maturing versus weakening markets
• Affordability and access to capital
• Land as an input versus an investment
• Family transfer and the role of advisors
• Timing a listing and choosing how to sell
Resources Mentioned
• Trent Klarenbach’s technical analysis of farmland values and his newsletter (klarenbach.ca)
• Strategic Coach: the dangers, opportunities and strengths exercise, and the three-years-from-now question
• Farm Credit Canada’s farm equity analysis, cited by Dan
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