Almond block, 320 acres, water district cut allocation to 40 percent. Do I underwrite the trees or the well?
Sitting on an offering for a mature almond block, roughly 320 planted acres, trees around year 11 of a stated 22 to 25 year productive life. Seller pro forma runs on full surface allocation. Actual district allocation has been well under that and the property has two ag wells with declining static levels.
The part I can't get comfortable with: the seller is pricing this as a permanent crop asset with a going-concern yield, but if I have to pump the deficit, my water cost per acre foot roughly triples and the operating margin goes negative in a low-price year for kernels. And in the states with groundwater allocation regimes coming into force, pumping isn't an unlimited backstop anyway, which varies a lot by basin and by state.
So does anyone here underwrite these as two separate assets, a declining biological asset with a hard terminal date plus a water right with its own value curve? Because if I discount the tree cash flows to zero at year 23 and value the dirt on a re-plant basis, the number I get is roughly 35 percent below ask and I want to know if I'm modeling it wrong or if the ask is just optimistic. Also curious how people handle the re-plant capital, since you're out of production for four or five years after you push the old block.