Arthur Blank, billionaire cofounder of Home Depot and owner of the NFL's Atlanta Falcons, just bought a $20 million Montana ranch. Take a look at the 9,300-acre property.
Arthur Blank, the billionaire cofounder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcon's NFL team, just bought a $20 million ranch in Montana.
Blank is worth an estimated $5.3 billion, according to Forbes.
He cofounded Home Depot with Bernie Marcus in 1978 and served as cochairman until 2001, when he stepped down.
The next year, Blank bought the NFL's Atlanta Falcons for about $545 million.
Blank's new property, the Paradise Valley Ranch, is located about nine miles south of Livingston in southwestern Montana.
It's near two other ranches he already owns, the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch and West Creek Ranch, according to Hall and Hall.
Livingston is a town of about 7,700 people that has attracted the attention of Hollywood celebrities.
Jeff Bridges, Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, and Michael Keaton have all called the area home.
The Paradise Valley Ranch is made up of 40 separate lots that span a combined 9,300 acres.
Approximately 1,700 acres are prime irrigated cropland, and the ranch controls an abundance of senior water rights, according to Hall and Hall.
The billionaire Home Depot cofounder says he bought the ranch for conservation purposes.
"What's most important for our neighbors to know is that this purchase is about conservation, not development," Blank said in a statement. "We will respect the tradition of ranching while keeping our lands in their original, intact state for the sake of beauty and wildlife."
Montana is a state that's particularly concerned with land conservation, especially as billionaires continue to buy up huge swaths of land in the Western US.
The Paradise Valley Ranch is mostly undeveloped.
"There are no major improvements on the land, only a small house and shop," Tim Murphy of Hall and Hall, who represented blank in the sale, told Business Insider.
According to the listing, the ranch "offers a multitude of wonderful homesites," and some of the land parcels have private road access as well as buried utilities already in place.
The thousands of acres of land serve as critical habitat for a giant herd of wintering elk, according to the brokerage.
An estimated 600 to 2,000 elk are passing through the ranch at any given time, according to the listing.
"With The Blank [family's] strong conservation ethic and incredible generosity, the ranch will soon become permanently protected," Murphy said. "It's a purchase they can certainly be proud of, and one that we Montanans can be thankful for."
The ranch offers stunning views of the Absaroka mountain range.
While the ranch is mostly undeveloped, some farms and ranches already operate on parts of the land and will continue to do so as lessees, according to Hall and Hall.
The ranch is a 30-minute drive from Bozeman, an outdoorsy college town with a population of about 48,000.
Thrillist named Bozeman one of the best small cities in America, and it's the most popular metro area in the country for new business startups, according to recent census data in a report published by ShivarWeb.
And Yellowstone National Park is about an hour's drive away.
Yellowstone, which is mostly in Wyoming but has sections in Montana and Idaho, was the first US national park and gets around four million visitors each year.
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