On a Wednesday in October, Jeff Mercer was on a tractor at his 816-acre ranch in Mangham, Louisiana, planting wheat.
“I just plant a little winter crop for the deer,” the retired inventor said in an interview with Homes.com. “And then you get to harvest it on the backside … make a little money and feed your wildlife at the same time.”
The deer are the true staple of Mercer’s ranch, a former hunting camp. He has listed the property, which includes a 5,000-square-foot home, for $16.6 million.
Eddie Davis of Brown Realty Co. of Rayville Inc. is handling the sale.
The price breaks down to roughly $20,000 per acre. Given what land around him in rural Richland Parish is going for, “Honestly, my property is cheap,” he said. “What’s going on is crazy.”
That’s because Meta began construction on a $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in December, causing property prices to skyrocket. Before last year, Mercer said land was going for roughly $1,000 to $5,000 per acre.
The new interest is just another opportunity in the making, according to Mercer.
“It’s a money maker, whether you want to do it yourself or rent it out,” he said. “This property offers the ideal balance of steady income and long-term appreciation.”
Built and bought it in stages
Mercer grew up in the nearby city of Monroe but would regularly visit his father and family in Mangham. “I grew up hunting here with my dad and hanging with my kinfolk,” he said. “This is really what I call home, even though I went to school 30 miles away.”
The land on which he lives was originally the grounds of the Hurricane Hunting Club, and his father was its president. When his dad passed away in 2007, the club dissolved, and Mercer started acquiring the land.
“I bought the middle, and I fenced it,” he said. “Then they wanted to sell the north end, so I bought it. And then they finally said, ‘Well, if we’re going to sell all that, we might as well sell it all.’”
Mercer estimates he spent roughly $4 million buying the property. He spent another $1 million paving the ¾-mile driveway and $3 million on fencing and other improvements.
Then he started building his house. “I built that in stages, too,” he said.
The two-story mansion has five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a lot of windows. “I wanted to be able to stand in the kitchen or the living room and see all the way around.”
Mercer said he wanted “a lot of wood” in the house and invested in cypress wood from Texas for the floors and other touches. “Very expensive, hard to get, but it’s beautiful,” he said. “A lot of character.”
The primary bedroom is “probably my favorite room in the house,” Mercer said. It also features wide windows for an outdoorsy feel indoors, aided by the fieldstone fireplace.
Another feature of the bedroom: it’s on the opposite side of the house from his daughters’ bedrooms. “So, I didn’t have to hear them and all their friends when they would come over.”
Watch the deer grow
Mercer completed the house in 2011, he said, though he recently remodeled the primary bathroom with new tile, a standing tub and a fireplace. “We just wanted to make it more modern,” he said.
Last year, he added a pondless waterfall outside for his deer, which has become one of his favorite features.
“In the evening time, the babies and the mamas and the big bucks, they come drink out of the waterfall,” he said. “That’s just a really good feeling to sit out on the porch and watch that.”
Mercer doesn’t hunt anymore since he lost his “hunting buddy,” that is, his father. “Now, I just like to watch [the deer] grow.”
He still lets other people hunt on his property. And he said there is a lot of money to be made leading paid hunting groups. He doesn’t bother with that, however; instead, he prefers to lead charity hunts for disabled hunters and wounded veterans.
“I get so much out of that, I stopped doing the paid hunts,” he said.
Mercer said caring for the ranch isn’t too demanding, but it’s a good way to keep busy for people who like to occasionally get on a tractor: “At times, you have things to do.”