January 6, 2025
Purchase of the 1,340-acre Pescadero Ranch was made last October by the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) for $15.65 million. This final sale price was very close to the property’s ecological asset value as determined by Eco-Asset Solutions and Innovations (EASI) in its report to San Francisco based clients Dave Wallace and his team of investor-owners.
‘Pescadero Ranch is completely unspoiled,’ said Wallace. ‘Our group is grateful that POST shared our perspective on how special this land is. Knowing it is permanently preserved leaves us with a great sense of satisfaction and serves as evidence that sometimes the best land development strategy is no development at all.’
The property will now be permanently conserved as part of POST acquisitions up and down the state’s central Coastal Range.
Pescadero Ranch is located along Pescadero Creek at the southeast edge of Santa Cruz County, southwest of Gilroy. It is home to multiple at-risk species such as California red-legged frog, California tiger salamander and the South-Central Coast steelhead trout. Steelhead were confirmed to be spawning on the property by National Marine Fisheries Service.
The property also provides critical habitat and wildlife connectivity for the region. Pescadero Ranch is part of a landscape linkage between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Gabilan Range, providing numerous ecosystem service benefits including high biodiversity, watershed protection, carbon sequestration, and scenic beauty to the surrounding communities. Habitat connectivity is important to ensure genetically healthy populations of wildlife across the region.
Marian Vernon, wildlife linkages program manager for POST, said that ‘Protecting biodiversity promotes the health of our local landscape. Its decline could have cascading impacts, affecting the broader community of plants and animals that make our region unique. It’s essential that we protect and maintain healthy, intact habitats for all native species.’
EASI studied the property’s potential gross eco-asset value drawing on known prices for compensatory mitigation credits in a five-county region surrounding Pescadero Ranch. EASI found that If landowners were to develop a mitigation bank on 956 of the 1340 acres, a gross mitigation credit value of $82 million could be realized. This was contrasted with $11 million in development costs for the mitigation bank. Over a ten-year operating period, using an 18% discount rate, net present value was found to be $16.7 million, or roughly $17,500 per acre. The realized sale price was 94% of EASI’s predicted value at the designated discount rate.
‘We are grateful that conservation groups are some of the first to affirm a property’s ecological asset value,’ said William Coleman EASI’s founder and president. ‘Eco-assets have been in play since the mid-1980s, but agencies and real estate appraisers have been slow to acknowledge the important role they play in the marketplace. POST now joins The Nature Conservancy, Conservation Fund, Environmental Defense, Audubon Society and Natural Resource Defense Council in affirming the market value of ecological assets.’
For more information contact William Coleman at wcoleman@easillc.com, or 415-706-6154.