From The Art of Investing in Art:
The Struggles and Stress of Selling Art
vs.
The Simple and Profitable Pleasure of Buying It 

In the years that followed my first attempt as a gallery owner, I gave up on selling art and resumed the simpler, easier, and more fun practice of buying it. And although I was buying only a few pieces a year, I was comfortable with the admittedly eclectic collection I was gradually assembling.

Then one day in the autumn of 2008, a woman came into my office in Delray Beach to drop off some newly framed pieces I’d acquired, and we got to talking.

Her name was Suzanne Snider. She was a long-time fan of the art world, had studied art in and out of college, and had even spent several years in Costa Rica running a surf shop and collecting Costa Rican paintings and prints. I told her about my experience learning about Mexican modern art from Bernard Lewin. And with her background in Costa Rican art and my acquaintance with Nicaraguan art, it didn’t take long before we were talking about the Central American modern and contemporary artists we both knew and wondering whether it made any sense to open a small gallery specializing in that relatively unknown corner of the art market.

We agreed to think about the feasibility of the idea and meet again the following month to discuss it further.

I spent the next several weeks researching the history of Central American art since the 1950s, and it wasn’t easy to find the information I was looking for. The only available books were basically publicity pieces for individual artists and individual shows.

It was discouraging at first, but what kept me going was the artwork itself. The images I was looking at were impressive in so many ways: skillful, sophisticated, and beautiful. Central American art was, in my opinion, the equal of Mexican art, and considerably less expensive.

For example, significant paintings by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were being bought at the time for $100,000 to $1 million. Significant paintings from Central America’s best modernists were being bought for less than a tenth of that.

I knew that I couldn’t afford to assemble an important collection of Mexican art, but it occurred to me that, with Suzanne’s help, I might be able to develop an equally great collection of Central American art.

And so we launched Ford Fine Art.

To keep expenses down, we rented a space that was half the size we probably needed and stocked most of it with paintings we already owned.

I was to act as founder and CEO, which meant writing a mission statement (which evolved as the years passed), creating and recreating business plans every six to twelve months (depending on our successes and failures), meeting with customers (especially those that we felt had “whale” potential), and signing an endless stream of checks.

Suzanne was to act as VP and Director, which meant doing everything I wasn’t doing, including researching the art market, identifying and contacting artists, negotiating deals with them (or their trusts), creating and placing advertising (under my guidance), keeping various inventories, entertaining clients, closing sales, and traveling to Central America when necessary.

Since both of us had had experience enduring the frustrations and fragility of retail art sales, we opted to sell high-quality art to serious art collectors. This meant we had to finance an inventory of such pieces, which I felt I could do because Central American artwork was so reasonably priced. It also meant finding and enlisting at least a dozen potential customers who could be persuaded to buy not just a single work here and there but to build their own collections.

While we were trying to develop our gallery business, Suzanne took on the additional task of helping me achieve my personal goal of building a comprehensive collection of Central America’s most important modernists.

Ford Fine Art, we had decided, was going to bill itself as a vendor of Mexican and Central American modernist masters, although we knew that the pieces we were going to be selling would be by the secondary artists or would be secondary works by the important artists. The important art from the most important artists… that we were going to secure for my personal collection.

The first major obstacle we faced in that quest was something I had already discovered. There was no authoritative literature on Central American modern art in general, nor were there many reliable books about the important modernists from the individual countries.

There were a few artists in each country that had achieved international fame. In Nicaragua, for example, there was Armando Morales and Alejandro Aróstegui. In Mexico, there was Francisco Zuñiga and Carlos Mérida. And in El Salvador, there was Benjamin Cañas and Ernesto “San” Aviles.

The rest were known only within their own countries, and only then by the few brokers that dealt with high-end art. These brokers, of course, would have been happy to sell to us, but they had very little of what we were looking for. At least 90% of it was hanging in the estates and mansions of a small number of very wealthy people.

Wealthy people generally don’t make a habit of selling their art because they are proud of what they own. And even when they run into financial difficulty and might be willing to sell some good pieces, they are reluctant to do so, lest their wealthy neighbors find out about it and gossip amongst themselves about poor old Señor or Señora Whatever. We eventually came up with a strategy for identifying these people and purchasing their art discreetly – a long, slow, and expensive process.

For most of our buying, Suzanne kept track of pieces I was personally interested in as they went on auction, identifying a price range that we believed was good and then bidding within that range, but no higher. As expected, we won some and we lost some.

Meanwhile, we struggled to make Ford Fine Art profitable.

We advertised in a variety of local and national media, and we tested different copy approaches. Some worked and some didn’t. But the ones that worked, worked only marginally, and the ones that lost tended to lose big.

We opened a “branch” of Ford Fine Art at Rancho Santana, an award-winning resort my partners and I had built on the Pacific Coast in Nicaragua. We were hoping that the combination of wealthy resort guests and the Latin American theme would provide us with a new income stream. But it turned out that the only things we could sell to the resort’s guests were mementos of their trips that were priced at less than $3,000.

We opened yet another gallery in Miami, on a main boulevard that was peppered with boutiques and galleries. There was even a dealer of fine Cuban art across the street. Given that the local community was mainly Latin and wealthy, and considering its proximity to other galleries, we decided that if that gallery didn’t work, none would, and we should consider retiring from the business if it hadn’t become profitable within twelve months.

There were just enough sales to give us hope. But at the end of our second year (which was the end of our lease), we cut bait and closed.

The gallery in Nicaragua did better, having profitable quarters here and there. But as I said, what we were selling was mostly low-priced pieces meant for tourists, and there was not enough traffic at the resort or margin in the pricing to give us steady, quarter-after-quarter profits.

Retail sales weren’t working. However, based on some advice from our neighbor across the street, the very successful dealer of Cuban art, we spent another two years renting booths at secondary art shows in Miami during the yearly Art Basel fairs. We might have made a profit, had we been permitted to show our wares in one of the bigger venues, but there were no openings. So that failed, too.

In all, we spent about eleven years and invested more than half a million dollars before we gave up on selling Mexican and Central American art on a retail basis.

Meanwhile, the investing and collecting side of our partnership was moving along. Piece by piece, artist by artist, we were developing what one day could be the world’s most valuable collection of Central American modernist art.

We were getting regular calls from collectors in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador who had heard about what we were doing and were open to selling us some of what we were seeking, so long as we kept it on the down low. It began as a trickle, but as time passed it became a flow.

Once the supply side of our enterprise was moving, I asked Suzanne to implement an “up-trade” protocol for the pieces I owned. This was not a new idea, but it was an approach that hadn’t been used in this corner of the art market – and with Suzanne’s attentive management, we could do it without creating a lot of buzz.

I had an initial goal in mind for what I considered to be the minimal optimal collection: two large, museum-quality pieces from the most cherished years of each major artist, and a half-dozen smaller pieces (pencil and ink drawings, gouaches, and limited-edition graphics) that illustrated the artist’s development over his or her career.

Of course, there was a fly in my ointment. Suzanne and I had figured out who we thought the most important Central American modernists were, but our opinions didn’t really matter because, as I said, there was no definitive authority out there. Not internationally and not even nationally.

The world needed an authority. And I thought, “Why can’t that be us?”

I had always wondered, when reading books on art history (or on any historic subject), “Who decided that this movement was more important than another movement, or this person was more gifted than someone else?”

And the answer I always arrived at was: The first person to codify and evaluate a cultural trend or movement or style is the prime mover, because everyone with an opinion that comes afterwards must refer to the framework and the opinions of the first.

And then I had this thought: this ambitious, almost arrogant thought: Why couldn’t Suzanne and I produce such a book on the modern art of Central America? We had all the published research that had been done until that time. We were building a network of the dealers, collectors, curators, and historians we needed. We were in touch with the few modernist artists still alive. This was a book that someone was going to write eventually. Why couldn’t we do it then?

Next chapter: The Book That Nearly Broke Me. 

 

From The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building:

The Speed of Money – 
Harnessing the Power of Momentum 
to Propel Your Wealth Higher 

Did they all, for example, have Alpha personalities – pushing themselves and others to work tirelessly to accomplish a goal? Did they all have certain advantages, such as friends or family members with money or connections?

I found nothing – no single set of circumstances or characteristics that was common to them all.

But I did discover one fascinating thing about their journeys from zero to a million dollars. All of their net worths rose slowly in the first two years, picked up somewhat in years three to five, and then shot up dramatically in years six and seven.

It looked like this:

That, I did not expect. Seven years or fewer? That seemed unrealistically fast. Reading the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door had given me a different idea. In that book, the authors had provided evidence that it took, on average, 30 or 40 years to achieve millionaire status.

Of course, The Millionaire Next Door was about American millionaires. And the fact is that most millionaires in America are not entrepreneurs or real estate investors or stock traders. They are people that earned a modest income but saved a larger-than-average percentage of that income over their entire lives.

To get a sense of how what they had achieved might look, I pulled up a chart I had developed years ago for Automatic Wealth and various articles and essays to illustrate the “miracle” of compound interest. (Note: To be conservative, I had used an average ROI of 7% to represent an equally weighted stock and bond portfolio, one averaging 10% and the other averaging 4%.)

As you can see, both lines begin with a very gradual rise over the first 10 years, increase a bit in the next 10 years, but don’t really start shooting up until year 30.

Using that as my basis of comparison, I had my accountant pull out the financial reports on about a dozen companies I had either personally started or had started with partners that had broken the million-dollar barrier.

I was looking not for gross revenues but for the book value of the companies – that is, the value of each business on a net-worth basis.

And I found that the timeframe to get from zero to a million had been less than seven years.

I then plotted the timeframes for all the companies on a line graph. And sure enough, they had the same growth curve – gradual during the first five years and then sharply up in years six and seven!

This, of course, is not the growth trajectory of all businesses. For most, it is up a bit for the first several years and then it flattens or dies off.

But that did not contradict what I was seeing. It’s commonly known that most businesses – as well as most financial schemes to achieve fast growth – fail. They fail because of bad business and investment decisions, either at the beginning or somewhere along the way.

What I was looking at, in other words, is not what happens to most people most of the time, but what happens to those people that get rich – i.e., break through the million-dollar barrier in seven or fewer years.

The difference: In the case of the successful businesses I had started, they grew at an average rate of 25% to 30%.

With a stock and bond portfolio, I would only expect an average ROI of 7%.

But in every case, the growth curve was basically the same.

Slow at first.

Increasing a bit in the middle.

And then at some wonderful point in time, shooting up sharply.

I didn’t think of it in these terms then, but what I had discovered was the wealth-building equivalent of Newton’s Second Law of Motion…

Momentum: Newton’s Second Law of Motion

One of Newton’s key theories was that “as an object gains speed or size, the rate of its momentum will increase.”

And that, I believe, is exactly what happened with the people I interviewed for Seven Years to Seven Figures and what I experienced with my own entrepreneurial ventures and real estate investments.

Look at this:

Mass x Velocity = Momentum 

Momentum is the result of something Newton called Mass multiplied by something he called Velocity.

That may sound vague and abstract. But as I discovered when I took the time to think about it, it’s actually easy to understand because it’s something we’ve all experienced thousands of times in our lives.

If you’ve ever seen a “Strongman” competition, for example, where each participant is chained to a huge truck or a railroad car and is challenged to get it moving as fast as he can, you’ve seen an example of this.

For the first 10 or 15 seconds, they strain with all their might, but the truck or railroad car doesn’t budge. Then it begins to move. Very slowly at first, but as each minute passes it picks up speed. And as they approach the finish line, they often appear to be sprinting.

What Did Newton Mean by “Mass”? 

In Physics, Mass (more correctly, Inertial Mass) is defined as “a measure of resistance to acceleration when a force is applied.” And the rule is that the larger its Inertial Mass is, the more difficult it is to accelerate an object.

You might think of it in terms of the density of the object, or even its weight.

A cubic foot of feathers, for example, is going to have much less Inertial Mass than a cubic foot of wood, and a cubic foot of wood is going to have much less Inertial Mass than a cubic foot of lead.

Got it?

What Did He Mean by “Velocity”?

Velocity is defined as “the rate at which an object changes its position with respect to time,” or the speed of an object combined with its direction of motion.

Imagine a person taking two steps forward and then one step back. He may be going at the same speed while stepping forward as he is while stepping backward, but his Velocity in getting from his starting point to his finish point will be about half that of his speed.

Got it?

Now we must simplify one more term: “Momentum.”

As mentioned above, the technical definition of Momentum is a measure of Velocity times Mass. In simpler terms, it is the inherent power or force of a moving object, which is a factor of its weight and speed.

You can visualize Momentum in the physical world by imagining the impact of, say, a small car like a Volkswagen hitting a wooden fence at, say, five miles an hour.

What is likely to happen to it? Probably nothing. And what would happen to the fence? Maybe a scrape or a scratch. But not much.

Now imagine that same car hitting the fence at 60 miles an hour. The front end of the Volkswagen would surely be damaged. Maybe significantly. And the fence? It would probably be knocked down.

Next, imagine a much heavier vehicle, say, a 10-ton truck, hitting the fence at 60 miles per hour. What would be the damage then? The truck would again have little damage, but the fence would almost certainly be destroyed.

Newton also talked about the force of Momentum in terms of how much energy it would take to slow down or stop an object that was already in motion.

So imagine the Volkswagen moving down a very slight decline at five miles per hour. And imagine it rolling toward a powerful man (like those participants in the “Strongman” contests mentioned above). He would probably be able to stop it, right?

But what if it were moving at 30 mph?

Or what if, instead of a VW, it was a 10-ton truck traveling at 60 miles an hour?

You get the point.

In Physics then, Momentum is a measure of the force it would take to move a still object from one position to another or, contrarily, the force it would take to slow down or stop an object that is already moving.

Applying this same natural law to the universe of building wealth, we could say that Momentum is the measure of what it takes to move from one position of wealth to another – for example, what it takes to increase your income from $50,000 a year to $250,000 a year. Or what it takes to go from a net worth of $500,000 to $1 million.

Are you still with me?

This brings us back to Newton’s equation: Mass x Velocity = Momentum.

So now, to convert that Law of Physics to a Law of Wealth Building, we need an analogy for both Mass and Velocity.

I suggest we define Velocity as the time it takes to move from one stage of wealth to a higher one. As in: It took me two years to reach a million dollars in net worth, but only nine months to get to $2 million, and only six months to get to $3 million, and so forth.

That’s simple enough. An analogy for Mass, however, is a bit more complicated.

When I began to work on this chapter, I equated Mass with work, as in how much work you might be willing and able to do to get to a net worth of $1 million.

But after discussing it with Sean, I realized that it was more than simply hard work. Looking again at those charts and remembering what it took for me to get to equity values of a million dollars or more in my businesses, I realized that it was a combination of many things.

Yes, hard work was a big factor. But another undeniable factor was making smart decisions. Another one was having intelligent and hardworking people around me – not just employees, but also professional advisors and consultants and even, in some cases, competitors who were willing to lend me a hand. Another one was the goodwill I developed with my suppliers, subcontractors, bankers, and investors. The more they trusted and believed in me, the easier it was for me to get the capital and terms I needed to grow the business. And that’s to say nothing of the goodwill of my customers. There may be no other business-building “resource” more powerful than that.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became. The resources that helped me build those companies so successfully in seven years or less were many – maybe too many to count.

This brought me to a definition of Mass as a component of Momentum in wealth building:

Mass is the span and depth of the personal, financial, social, and political resources 
that can be applied to building wealth. 

Let’s Count the Ways

Personal Resources 

By Personal Resources, I mean everything you (or in business, everyone involved) bring to the table. Here are some that immediately pop to mind:

* Intelligence (IQ)
* Emotional Intelligence (EQ, or common sense)
* Knowledge (both general & specific)
* Skills (leadership skills, negotiating skills, etc.)
* Ambition
* Confidence
* Tenacity
* Endurance
* Charisma
* Commitment

I don’t think I have to explain how helpful all of the above can be in building wealth, either as an individual or as a business leader.

What needs to be said, however, is just as obvious: No one has all or even most of these qualities. What is also obvious is that the more of them you put into play, the more likely it will be for you to efficiently grow your income and, thus, build wealth.

Also worth mentioning: Some of these qualities, such as IQ or charisma, may be inherent – i.e., you have them or you don’t. But many more are things you can learn and improve on over time.

Financial Resources 

This would include the following (no explanation needed):

1. Cash and other liquid financial assets
2. Additional financial assets
3. Creditworthiness
4. Financial connections

Social Resources 

Admittedly, Social Resources is not a category you’d likely find in a textbook on building businesses or acquiring wealth. Nevertheless, in my experience, they can be amazingly helpful.

To my mind, these are the most powerful:

1. People that like you
2. People that trust you
3. People that will vouch for you
4. People that will confide in you
5. People that will teach you
6. People that believe in you
7. People that will share with you

I could write a separate chapter just on this category. And given its importance (and how seldom these resources are considered), perhaps one day I will.

For the moment however, I’d like you to consider your own experiences as a businessperson and wealth seeker. Think about the many ways working with such people helped you create partnerships, build teams, and negotiate deals.

Political Resources 

I’m conflicted about this category because I usually think of politics and political people as being antithetical to building wealth. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I am including it as being potentially helpful so long as you think of it as a subset of Social Resources.

It’s virtually impossible to build a large business or develop a financially successful project without dealing with political players – either on the federal, state, or local level. And although I would advise you, if I were your mentor, not to seek out political connections as a general rule, I also know from experience that when you need a loan or a business project approved or you have to settle some dispute with a government entity, it is much easier if the bureaucrats and other political parties involved in making the decision like, trust, and/or believe in you.

The More Wealth-Building Resources, the Better 

When I think of what it took to increase my net worth from below nothing to a hundred thousand dollars and from there to a million dollars and from a million to 10 million and from 10 million to beyond 100 million, I recognize that I sought out as many of the financial, social, and political wealth-building resources as I could find.

Perhaps I did that because I felt insecure about the few personal resources I had in the beginning (intelligence, ambition, and commitment).

Or perhaps it was because it just seemed like common sense.

What I can tell you with certainty is that I have seldom met anyone who was greedier than I was to acquire and use them all.

I have worked with many businesspeople who believed in the “less is more” approach to building businesses and personal wealth. Most of them had some success with it, but I can think of very few who began with as little as I did and ended up with as much.

As I said, when I first stepped onto the path of building a fortune, I had just a small handful of personal resources to rely on. Not much, but enough to put myself on an upward climb within the hierarchy of the company I worked for. But by the time I reached the pinnacle in terms of becoming a partner in a thriving business, I had already developed dozens of additional resources that I could use to keep growing my wealth.

What did I initially bring to the table?

I was usually the first to get into the office and the last to leave. By volunteering to do just about anything asked, I acquired valuable knowledge about how the company worked as well as valuable skills (how to read a balance sheet, write a contract, negotiate a deal, etc.).

By making a commitment to keep my business promises and do anything I could to help them achieve their goals, I gained the trust of my fellow workers and managers and eventually my boss.

I spent time outside of the business at trade shows, conventions, and seminars, where I met smart and accomplished people, some of whom became colleagues and friends.

I saved money by reducing my spending on unnecessary things and spending a portion of it wisely on things that would make me more money, such as home-study programs on public speaking and negotiating and “winning friends and influencing people.”

As my contributions to the business I worked for increased, so did my salary. And by keeping my living expenses in check, I was able to bank an increasingly larger percentage of my take-home pay.

When I became not only the number one marketer in my company but one of the top marketers in my industry, I persuaded my boss to give me a share of the profits.

I then used every resource I had – my knowledge, my skills, my industry connections – to help my boss (and now partner) grow our business from several million to more than $100 million.

And I did it again with a second business, helping to grow that one to more than a billion dollars.

Looking back at all that now, I can see that what I was doing was taking advantage of the natural law of Momentum to achieve more of my wealth-building goals faster and faster.

Yes, it took a good deal of hard work. There is no question that I outworked almost everyone I worked with. But I could have done that and made very little progress were it not for the steadily increasing “Mass” of my resources being multiplied by the steadily increasing “Velocity” of my net worth’s upward trajectory.

And if you remember Newton’s theory: If you can increase both Velocity and Mass, what you get is an increase in Momentum – i.e., the likelihood that, as time passes, the results of anything you try to do will increase geometrically.

 

From Rancho Santana Then and Now:

Chapter 3. Scouting for Some Promising Land 

The goal was to find an overseas location, preferably on a seacoast, where International Living could buy and sell beachfront property to its subscriber base.

Price was perhaps the top consideration. We were looking to arbitrage the difference between beautiful coastal property, the kind you can find in the U.S. or on some Caribbean islands, but for a fraction of the price that our subscribers would expect to pay for a piece of it.

“We needed someone to do the research for us,” says Kathleen Peddicord, International Living’s publisher at the time. “But not just anyone. We needed someone who understood real estate and property development, too.”

That person turned out to be Bob Fordi, the brother of an editor that was working for the publication.

Fordi had experience in real estate (as an accountant, a consultant, and an investor). Plus, he had a lot of travel experience. He was given the assignment.

It so happened that International Living had just published its annual “Best Places to Retire” issue, and Nicaragua was rated number one in the budget category. “Beachfront land in Nicaragua wasn’t only relatively cheap,” says Peddicord, “it was absurdly cheap back then.”

Top billing plus inexpensive land! So… Fordi was off to Nicaragua to start the search.

The perception of Nicaragua at that time was not good. Most Americans knew it as a dangerous, poverty-stricken, and war-torn country, still suffering from civil strife.

The reality was that the civil war had ended with a peaceful election ten years earlier. Nicaragua’s economy was poor and still recovering from the war. But political discord had died down and, for the most part, Nicaraguans wanted to put the war behind them and move forward.

“In those days,” says Fordi, “when you would fly into Managua, it was like the 1950s at the airport. No jetway, just those old-style roll-up stairs. No air conditioning. There wasn’t even any power at the open-air customs station. Everything was still quite primitive.”

Primitive, but beautiful. Prices for beachfront property in neighboring Costa Rica, where Americans were already looking for a safe and sunlit retirement haven, were climbing strongly. The same type of beachfront property in Nicaragua, just several dozen miles north, was three to five times cheaper.

Fordi spent more than six months touring the country, traveling from its southern border with Costa Rica to its northern border with Honduras, and from the Pacific Ocean on the west to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea on the east. And as he visited potential project sites, he was meeting with government officials, business leaders, travel professionals, lawyers, accountants, and even foreign tourists.

“Nicaragua was brand-new to me,” Fordi says. “Not just the land and the culture, but the laws and regulations governing the kind of project we were attempting to do.”

What Fordi found was tens of thousands of salable and available acres – on the beach, on the hills overlooking the ocean, and on cliffs and mountainsides overlooking lush valleys and fertile plains.

“The quality of the land and the views was as good as I saw anywhere in Central America,” he says. “But the prices were so much better. And the Nicaraguan people were so welcoming and positive about our plans.”

Matt Turner, International Living’s corporate counsel, had the same impression. “I’m a big fan of the average Nicaraguan,” he says. “They are a hardy and very optimistic people. They’ve had a rough time. But when I spoke to them, they weren’t complaining about the difficulties of the recent past. They were talking about the possibilities of the future.”

Encouraged by Fordi’s appraisal of Nicaragua’s investment potential, the International Living team – headed by Bill Bonner, Mark Ford, and Kathleen Peddicord – gave the go-ahead for him to take the next step and find the right property for them to buy.

Back home in Baltimore, Fordi located a Nicaraguan attorney who introduced him to Steve Snider, an American expat who was living in Nicaragua and looking to start a real estate business there. After several conversations to clarify exactly what they were looking for, Snider set out to see what he could find.

A few months later, Fordi got a call.

“I think I found what you’re looking for,” Snider said. “It’s called Rancho Santana. It’s basically a large, neglected cattle farm. But it has everything: beautiful beaches, hills and cliffs with fantastic views of the ocean, and it’s only about an hour north of San Juan del Sur and about ninety minutes southwest of Granada.”

Granada, circa 1993
When Mark Ford heard that, he decided to go down and check out the property for himself. It was late in the year, and the rainy season had already begun. The drive from Tola, a small town in the county of Rivas thirty miles or so west of the property, usually took about forty minutes. During the rainy season, it was more difficult.

Ford remembers: “For the first forty minutes, the road was bumpy and muddy, but that was to be expected given that it was used only by big trucks, horses, and oxen. Then we began hitting runoff streams of water coming from the hills to the west of us and, in some cases, lake-fed streams that were moving like raging rivers. We made it past a few of them – just barely – and then, when we were just a mile or so from the property, we hit one that was so intense it would have picked up our SUV and deposited in the ocean if we had been foolish enough to try to drive across it.

“We asked a local farmer to haul us across with his small tractor. He refused. But he did agree to guide us over on muleback, which, having no other option, we agreed to. So, there I was, thirty minutes later, in the middle of nowhere, on a donkey, following a guy on a donkey with a wide-brimmed sombrero on his head and a bandolero across his chest. And I was thinking that I could just as well have been Meriwether Lewis crossing the Missouri River after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803!”

On this, Ford’s first visit to the property, there was only one building: the shack on the beach that the owners, the Granados family, had stayed in when they vacationed there.

The parcel on offer was 1,600 acres of flatland, hills, and cliffs, including two rivers and five beaches.

“The big, pure beauty of it was very California,” says Ford. “The topography struck me as very much like the West Coast of the United States – which, now that I think about it, should not have seemed surprising since it is the same coastline. But this was California as it looked 200 years ago.”

One by one, the other members of the team came down. Struck by the natural beauty of the property – and the entire country – they all agreed. They had found their land. Rancho Santana was it.