Farms in my far more hicksville area of PA than Boyd’s are getting 1.5 million at the bottom end – and they don’t have nearly the amenities (or property, or reputation) that Boyd’s has. Shedrow barns are fine and functional.
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I don’t know anything about BM or any other eventing BNT’s business.
But, I was in racing for decades, and it never ceased to surprise me how many even well respected, filthy rich or seemingly so owners did not pay their bills. At all. Or, they would pay a self-granted discounted rate and months late to boot. They would ask for multiple-horse deals, as in ‘this is my (fifth, fifteenth, etc.) horse so I should be paying a lesser day rate, yes?’
A horse gets injured and the owner wants to cut their losses, but the trainer thinks a lot of the horse and offers to keep it for cost to feed, hoping in 3 months it will be ready to return to full pay, but meanwhile the owner got used to it and now expects all kinds of deals. Or, an owner is having a bad month or year so the trainer starts taking on more and charging the owner less to keep the horses and help keep the owner in the business. This all adds up, over time, and can really snowball; before you know it, you the trainer are footing more than half the bills on horses and you wonder how you ended up there.
Just some perspective on how something in horses can look so good and solid and can not be that at all.
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Nah, I’m good. 
To give you a rough idea of prices in this area. I have a 2 acre property that is not zoned for horses. 2800 square foot house, 2 small sheds. My house would easily sell for $450,000-$500,000. Location, location, location. If you added in all his rings, horse housing, xc course, indoor etc… it is well worth WAY more than $1m.
A horse farm near me (jogging distance) just sold for just under $3M. Less fancy dressage indoor, dressage outdoor, no jumping rings, no xc. No galloping tracks. No swimming. Likely 1/3 the acreage. In a less horse desirable area. I live within an hour of Windurra.
It is very well worth over a million dollar property times a few in this area. Shed rows or not.
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The raw land value is easily several million these days.
Boyd bought the raw land during the Great Recession, or shortly afterwards, when there was still a bit of real estate slump. He undoubtedly paid a lot; I’m sure we could find the transaction if anyone cared enough to dig, although I don’t think he bought it all at once.
But in the years since, not only have the prices rebounded, but we also had the post-covid boom. So the land is worth a fortune with or without improvements.
But my point about it not being your typical multimillion dollar training facility is that Boyd’s barns and fields are extraordinarily utilitarian and not the type of place you’d expect of a recent world #1 rider.
The other improvements have been done over time. A lot of the early stuff Boyd built himself— he built the original XC jumps and did the earth moving himself from what I know. The rings were added over time and have improved a lot. The indoor is gorgeous but was one of the more recent additions.
You know what cracks me up? Sometimes when there are threads here on COTH about moving your horses home, people get very insistent that you need a lot of little luxuries even if you are just keeping a couple companion horses. I think Windurra is a fabulous example that no, you don’t need a lot of luxuries… you can be one of the most successful programs in the country and build things piece by piece, spend your money where it is most needed, hold off on big projects until you can find a way to fund them, etc.
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Would like this 10X over if I could. EXACTLY.
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This is what makes me value my land and home so much. I got it at an unreal Foreclosure price and sure I have an easement with a Water Utility to possibly, one day, be the location for spray fields, but every other day it’s perfect and was insanely cheap.
Em
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YES! If Boyd built fancy then the prices would go way up for everything…the fancy is always for the owners…horses could care less. I am seeing a lot of the “fancy” barn stuff and it’s 2,000 and up for board. The average person can’t pay that so let a barn be a barn as long as we are all safe and well fed!
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Yup, no fancy tack rooms, no “rider lounges”, no kitchenettes. But everything workmanlike and functional.
IIRC, the one bathroom is in Silva’s barn, in the her tack room. The tackroom is tiny for the size of the barn. But the thing that made me laugh is that it has a HUGE industrial washer and dryer. HUGE.
Priorities, baby, priorities.
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Windurra is ~ 75 acres, and borders properties that are thousands of acres and preserved open space via conservation easements, etc. Cochranville is in Chester County.
The fact that it is mostly cleared acreage? With well established pasture and turf? That also increases the value of the land.
The property is definitely worth millions. Regardless of how fancy (or not) the shadow barns are. Location, location, location.
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For fun, since we are now talking Windurra’s worth.
Zillow’s estimate of what it should sell for currently is $2,599,700, with a estimated range of $1.9M - $3.43M. I am sure that Zillow is not taking the improvements of gallop track & XC into effect with those prices just based on it being Zillow. Maybe its including the arena’s but probably not. Honestly probably just raw land estimate with house.
Looking at the tax map, Boyd paid over 2M for the property in 2010.
“The 2010 real estate market was marked by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession” via Google AI.
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A lot of the time things like a gallop track and xc course don’t add a ton of value because the market for them is so limited. The land is probably as or more valuable without them.
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Now that you mention it, I remember hearing that same story about buying lots of stalls at a bargain price. As you say, they were originally meant to be replaced eventually.
I’ve never been to Windurra so I can’t comment first hand on the fancy tack rooms, etc - but I did watch the tour Piggy March made of the place last year on her channel. And that indoor arena would definitely be on the more fancy end of the spectrum than ‘utilitarian’. He also specifically said that there was a lounge, etc because it was important to keep owners happy.
That former elementary school next door they also bought and remodeled for their working students, etc is also probably quite valuable.
(Edit to fix my typo: owners should be plural here from what I remember from the interview with Piggy)
Good to know.
Yes, the indoor is spectacular. I didn’t see the lounge.
I wonder if by “the owner” he meant Silva.
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I bet he meant owners of the horses. Have somewhere nice & dry & warm/cool for them to see how their horses are going.
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That would be my guess. Owners, plural.
I do remember him saying something about buying the school next door, so obviously they have been adding things and doing things since they’ve been there.
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Yes! Typo on my part! 
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They probably aren’t.
When we sold our last place, the realtor said it was really hard to come up with comps for horse properties–to the average RE agent, a barn and hay shed and a ring and paddocks weren’t worth anything.
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The people that bought our old farm, took out the riding ring, run-ins and barn. We’ll probably being selling our current farm within ten years. It’s a move in ready horse farm but I don’t think that will matter much to buyers.
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