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LAND LINE - Features
Big Sky Broker
“Bozeman blew my mind,” says Greg Fay, as recalls the day he first set eyes on Montana’s Gallatin Valley. In the early 1980s the boyish-looking 43-year-old was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado studying English lit.
“I knew I’d end up here someday. The area had everything I wanted recreationally and the fewest people,” he recalls. After graduating from CU in 1984, Fay landed a job selling real estate in Colorado and stuck with it for eight years. But the calming waters and wide open spaces of Montana beckoned, so in 1992 he loaded his Ford pickup and took off for Bozeman with a dog named Kody and two passions in mind: fly fishing and selling real estate.
“To get started in a new market place, I knew I needed a niche,” says Fay. So he conjured up the idea of targeting anglers in search of recreational property. His company, Fay Fly Fishing Properties, has since evolved into one of the top sporting real estate brokerages nationwide. An avid outdoorsman, Fay also had an ulterior motive in choosing this demographic: countering the rampant development threatening Montana’s family farms and river corridors. Protecting the Rocky Mountain West has always been as much a motivation to Fay as brokering a big ranch.
Fast forward to 2006. Fay Fly Fishing Properties has become Fay Ranches, which also includes Fay Management, a sister company formed to assist new ranch owners. Fay not only sells ranches throughout the Northern Rockies but also in select international locations.
“My job has increasingly become more enjoyable over time because of the people I work with,” says Fay. “The environment is different from other real estate offices I’ve worked in because we don’t compete against each other. We work together and share knowledge.”
Though several other realtors in this market have chosen to don starched, fresh-off-the-hanger fishing vests for promotional photos, the authentic passion of Fay’s team seems to set them apart from their competition. They don’t pretend to live the Orvis lifestyle; they were living it long before A River Runs Through It hit the big screen.
“We joke that none of us in the office could sell widgets if our lives depended it,” laughs Fay. “We’re not that good as salesmen. We just love our product so much.”
Professional yet easy-going with a glint of Tom Sawyer in his eye, Fay genuinely enjoys his job and says he is drawn to the landowners and clients he encounters on a daily basis. “The people we work with are tremendously successful businessmen from all different arenas. It’s interesting to get to spend several days in your truck with people who have accomplished what they’ve accomplished.”
Fay says the intent of most buyers is to enjoy their investment. “They don’t have goals to subdivide it. When we have them captive in our trucks we educate them on impacting the wildlife as little as possible and identify resources on the ranch we can improve on.” They talk at length about conservation easements, which allow landowners to donate some or all of the development rights to their property in exchange for substantial tax benefits. Fay and his associates regularly work with organizations such as the Montana Land Reliance to protect tens of thousands of acres from development.
While he admits the definition of a recreational property can be very broad, Fay says an agricultural component is a critical in everything they sell.
“It’s important to us that our customers’ intentions are not only to enjoy their ranch, but also to become responsible stewards of the land. The strength of any ranch investment is directly dependent not only on the quality of the fisheries but also the health and diversity of wildlife populations and the continuation of our agricultural heritage,” he says.
This is precisely why Fay Management was created. Depending on the buyer’s vision, the team develops a custom plan for farming and grazing, weed control, fencing, irrigation, habitat enhancement, aquatics, and soil restoration. They interview potential employees and lessees, negotiate agreements, and oversee the operation over time. They also work with clients to design and supervise home construction and remodeling projects.
Says Fay, “When many of our clients started to get a sense of the magnitude of owning a ranch, they felt overwhelmed. We help with that transition and work to bring a new ranch owner’s vision to reality.”
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