160 Auctions, 14 States, One Method: What 2025 Said About Land Auction Breadth

The land auction industry is, by default, a regional business. The buyer relationships, the land production knowledge, the local operator dynamics, and the trust required to sign a multi-million-dollar listing all tend to concentrate inside a single region, state, or a tight cluster of counties. That regional gravity is real — and it is also why a small number of firms have built something different. Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company conducted 160 real estate auctions in 2025, in 14 states, across asset classes ranging from an irrigated dairy operation to oil-and-gas industrial yards to a 16-acre estate in Tucson. The sold rate across all 160 auctions was 96%. On tillable farms specifically, it was 99%.

Those numbers are the headline. The structure underneath them is the story.

Breadth, Measured in Transactions

2025 sales recorded by Schrader spanned the Eastern Corn Belt (Indiana and Ohio), the Midwest (Illinois and Missouri), the Lake States (Wisconsin and Michigan), the Northeast (New York), the Southeast (Kentucky), the Southwest (Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Arizona), and the Pacific Northwest (Washington). The asset list traveled with the geography — row-crop farmland, irrigated dairy operations, recreational and hunting tracts, development-corridor land, country clubs, commercial buildings, residential portfolios, oil-and-gas industrial properties, and large grain-handling complexes. A regional auction firm sees one or two of those categories. Schrader's 2025 calendar contained all of them.

Three sales illustrate the range better than a list ever could:

• Van Rijn Farms — Franklin County, Washington. 747.5± acres of irrigated cropland in the South Columbia Basin, offered in 11 tracts with homes, livestock facilities, commodity sheds, and a dairy parlor. The auction drew an estimated 200 in attendance and 52 registered bidders from Washington to Illinois to Florida. Final result: $14,105,000, with the irrigated land averaging $17,932 per wet acre and the property selling to 8 different buyers across the 11 tracts.
• Britton Farms — Putnam, Hendricks & Montgomery Counties, Indiana. 1,357± FSA tillable acres of premier row-crop ground with significant drainage improvements, irrigation capable of 250 BPA dry corn, and on-site grain storage. Offered in 21 tracts. Final result: $20,820,000 at an average of $14,662 per acre, with the land selling almost entirely to local farmers.
• Multiple Trusts (Flynn) — Canadian and Oklahoma Counties, Oklahoma. 237± acres of development-corridor land between Oklahoma City and Piedmont. Final result: $7,888,400 at an average of $33,284 per acre, sold to 9 different buyers.

Three regions, three asset classes, three buyer profiles — one auction methodology.

The Multi-Tract Method, in 2025

The Van Rijn auction is the clearest 2025 demonstration of the multi-tract method at work. The farm contained at least four asset categories within a single offering — cropland, residential, livestock facilities, and commodity infrastructure. The conventional way to sell that property is to package it as a single going concern and accept whichever single buyer is willing to absorb every component. Schrader's team divided the property into 11 tracts and let buyers compete on the components they actually wanted — or, through combination bidding, tie tracts together when joint ownership made economic sense. The four home tracts isolated as residential offerings totaled $2,100,000. The former dairy facility sold separately for $510,000. The remaining vacant cropland sold in a range of $15,910 to $22,777 per wet acre. Eight buyers across eleven tracts. Almost none of those buyers would have purchased the farm as a whole.

The same method, applied at very different scales, produced the Britton result in Indiana (21 tracts, premium row-crop ground sold largely to neighboring operators), the Flynn result in Oklahoma (development tracts engineered for nine separate development buyers), and the Tolan result in Knox County, Indiana — 819± acres across 4 farms, divided into 13 tracts, sold to 7 different buyers for $7,200,000. The method does not care whether the asset is irrigated dairy, dryland row crop, or development corridor. It cares whether the property has multiple buyer pools competing for different highest-and-best uses, and it puts each of those pools in a position to bid.

What the 2025 Market Actually Did

The Purdue Land Value Survey released in August 2025 reported Indiana top-quality farmland at $14,826 per acre in June 2025, slightly below the December 2024 peak of $14,970 — a mid-year softening on top of a 3% year-over-year gain. Average- and poor-quality tracts saw similarly modest declines from the December peak. Schrader's own 2025 sales tracking aligned with that pattern: high-quality farms continued to sell exceptionally well, average-quality tracts remained stable, and the greatest softening occurred at the bottom of the quality tier — particularly where the recreational component was weak. Where poorer-quality land carried hunting or recreational appeal, the value held.

The market in 2025 was not a single market. It was a collection of localized markets in which the strength of neighboring operators, the proximity of alternative uses (data centers and other large-capital projects continued to push capital into specific rural communities), and the volume of land traded nearby over the prior three to four years all mattered as much as soil productivity. A blanket description of "the 2025 land market" simply did not exist. A farm's value had to be analyzed farm-by-farm.

End-to-End, Under One Roof

The breadth visible in the auction calendar is supported by in-house capacity that does not appear on the auction calendar at all. Schrader's appraisal department posted a 17% year-over-year increase in output in 2025, added three new personnel, and now operates with more than 80 years of combined appraisal experience across its certified general appraisers and trainees. New agents joined the firm in Wisconsin (Verona, relocating to northeastern Wisconsin in May), western Indiana (Marshall County), and at the Columbia City home office. The firm's marketing operation runs an in-house graphics department, dedicated mailing lists, and a website receiving more than 11.5 million hits per month. Equipment auctions are streamed simultaneously across three online bidding platforms in addition to the live crowd.

None of that is incidental to the auction results. A 96% sold rate across 160 auctions in 14 states is not the product of a sales team alone. It is the product of an integrated organization in which appraisal, marketing, technology, and on-the-ground agents are all in the same building, working from the same data, on behalf of the same seller.

What This Means for a Seller

The first question a landowner should ask of any auction firm is not "what have you sold?" It is "what kinds of property have you sold, where, and to whom?" A firm whose 2025 calendar is one asset class in one state is well-equipped for that asset class in that state. A firm whose 2025 calendar includes irrigated cropland in Washington, row-crop in Indiana, dairy infrastructure in Wisconsin, development land in Oklahoma, an estate in Arizona, oil-and-gas yards in Texas, and a country club in Kentucky has demonstrated that its method, its buyer reach, and its in-house capacity are not bound to a single market. 2025 was the proof. The method that produced 8 buyers across 11 tracts in the Columbia Basin is the same method that produced 9 buyers across 23 tracts on the edge of Oklahoma City — and the same method that produces buyer competition on a 40-acre Indiana farm.

For a landowner weighing how to bring a property to market in 2026, the relevant question is whether the firm marketing that property has done the work, in the right places, with the right outcomes, in the year just behind us. Contact Schrader for a confidential conversation about a specific property.