Brittany Murphy, ALC

Nebraska Land Agent Nate Bahe Joins Ironhorse Land Company We are glad to introduce Nate Bahe, a Nebraska land agent joining the Ironhorse Land Company team. Nate works with buyers and sellers of farm, hunting, and recreational ground across eastern and central Nebraska. He is based in Wahoo, in Saunders County, which puts him about half an hour from both Lincoln and Omaha. Nate did not arrive at land through a career change spreadsheet. He grew up in it. Raised in Central Nebraska Agriculture Nate grew up in a small town in central Nebraska, the kind of place where you knew whose ground was whose and what everybody had in it. Agriculture and hunting were not weekend hobbies at his place. They were how the calendar worked. Fall meant something specific. So did spring. That upbringing changes how a person looks at a property. You do not see acres. You see what somebody built and what it took to build it. For a landowner deciding who to trust with a family farm, that difference matters. In addition, it shows up in the small things, like knowing why a field edge sits where it does, or why an old fence line still gets talked about at Thanksgiving. From Collegiate Athlete to Teacher and Coach Nate earned his degree at Nebraska Wesleyan University, where he played four years of college basketball. The part that stuck with him was not the games. It was the film sessions. You sit and watch the same forty seconds twelve times until you finally see what was actually happening. As a result, you learn that it is almost never what you thought was happening while you were out there. Slowing something down until you genuinely understand it turned out to be a habit worth keeping. After college, Nate taught and coached. That experience shapes how he works today more than anything else. Coaching teaches you that people lead with the easy version of their problem. A kid says he is fine. A parent says it is about playing time. Usually it is neither. Land works the same way. A decision to sell is rarely only about the ground. Instead, it is tied to family, timing, taxes, a lease that stopped making sense, or something nobody has said out loud yet. Because of that, Nate starts with the conversation and not the number. How This Nebraska Land Agent Approaches a Property Nate does the front end of this business the slow way, and we think that is the right call. He walks a property rather than pulling it up on a screen. He wants to see the access, the water, the field edges, and what a place looks like in more than one season. Meanwhile, he is asking about the family and about what the next stretch of someone's life is supposed to look like. That answer usually changes the recommendation. Here is why that matters on the marketing side. Every piece of land has a specific audience. The buyer for 240 acres of hunting timber and the buyer for irrigated cropland are not the same person. They do not look in the same places. Furthermore, they do not respond to the same information. That gap is even wider in this part of the state. A lot of recreational demand comes out of Lincoln and Omaha, and those buyers are working from a completely different set of priorities than a neighbor expanding his operation. Getting a property in front of the right group instead of the widest group is most of the work. It is also where ground ends up sitting on the market longer than it should. Habitat, Conservation, and Why It Affects Value Nate is a member of Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever. Part of that is because he hunts. The other part is more practical. Habitat is what makes recreational ground worth anything in the first place. A property with good cover, water, and a plan behind it holds value in a way a bare tract never will. Consequently, that is worth understanding whether you are buying or selling. For sellers, it often means there is value on the place that is not showing up in the asking price. For buyers, it means knowing what you can realistically build over the next five years. Serving Eastern and Central Nebraska Nate and his fiancée live in Wahoo. Most of his work runs through the counties around Saunders and out into central Nebraska, including: Saunders County Butler County Dodge County Colfax County Douglas and Sarpy Counties Cass County Lancaster County Seward County Platte and Polk Counties If you own ground in this part of the state, or you are looking to buy in it, Nate is close by and easy to get ahold of. Get in Touch Whether you are years out from a decision or ready to move this season, Nate is glad to talk it through with no expectation attached. He will walk your ground, give you a straight read on it, and tell you what he actually thinks. That last part is worth more than most people expect. Contact Nate Bahe, Nebraska land agent with Ironhorse Land Company Phone: (308) 201-0321 Email: Nate@IronhorseLandCompany.com | Based in Wahoo, Nebraska

I met Koby Rickertsen at the Realtors Land Institute's National Land Conference, over coffee. Or maybe it was bourbon, which at the NLC is usually just the better version of the same conversation. Either way, that is how it tends to go there. The real talking does not happen in the sessions. It happens out in the hallways and at the bar and over breakfast, lanyards still on from the day before, a few hundred land people who genuinely like each other all in one place. And that is the thing about the Realtors Land Institute. It gathers up the real land people and puts them in the same room, and land folks have a way of recognizing their own. Takes about thirty seconds. The ones who have actually walked the ground just sound different than the ones who sell a house on Tuesday and a back forty on Friday. Koby was one of the real ones. And I would like to think I was too. That conference is where this whole company started. Long before there was a sign out front, or a logo, or a single listing, there was the Institute and the people it brought together. So if you want to understand how we think about land, and about the families who own it, this is the place to start. What the Realtors Land Institute Actually Is The Realtors Land Institute, RLI for short, is the land division of the National Association of Realtors. It got its start in 1944, back when it still went by the Farm and Land Institute, and it has spent the better part of eighty years doing one stubborn thing. Taking land seriously as its own profession. And it really is its own thing. Land is not houses. A house has comparable sales right down the street and a roof you can lay your hand on. Land has water rights and mineral rights, access and easements, soil that either produces or it does not, and a whole rulebook about what you can and cannot do with every acre. None of that shows up in a pretty photo. All of it shows up at closing. RLI is built for the people who live in those details. Farm and ranch, timber, hunting and recreation ground, development tracts, raw dirt. Its members are land people through and through. The Room Most Agents Never Walk Into Here is something most folks never find out. Most of the agents out there selling land have never once set foot in that room. They sell houses for a living and handle a piece of ground every now and then, as a favor or a little side trip. To them, land is just a bigger lot. An RLI member made a different choice. Joining up is a way of saying, out loud, that land is the work and not the sideline. It means going through LANDU, the Institute's education program, which gets all the way down into the parts of a deal that catch unprepared people off guard. It means being part of a national network of land specialists who are trading buyers and sellers and hard-won market knowledge back and forth every single day. And it means answering to a real code of conduct under the National Association of Realtors. That is the thing I would look for if I were handing somebody my land. Not the letters after their name. The commitment sitting underneath them. An RLI member chose this work. They keep learning it. They run with the folks who know it best. Those are the kind of agents we are proud to stand next to. A Peak, Not a Gate There is a summit inside the Institute, and it is called the Accredited Land Consultant, the ALC. It takes years to earn. A hundred and four hours of coursework, a big exam, a documented track record of real transactions, peer review, all of it. Most land agents never even attempt it. The ones who carry it tend to move serious volume. The Institute's own 2025 survey put the average ALC at $24.9 million in transactions a year, next to $10.2 million for agents without it. Koby and I hold our ALC. We are proud of that, and we will happily tell you so. But I want to be real clear about this part, because it matters to me. The ALC is a peak, not a gate. The education and the gut instinct that make somebody good at land run through every member of the Institute, designation or not. A strong land agent is strong because of the work they have put in and the ground they have walked, and that does not start or stop with one set of initials. That is the standard our whole team is built on. What Grew Out of That Room Here is the part that still kind of gets me. Koby sells rural land in Nebraska. Quiet country, big sky, ground that has been in the same families for generations. I came up as a development broker in one of the fastest growing towns in America, where the dirt changes hands fast and there is a new rooftop every time you turn around. Two completely different worlds. About as different as land gets. And one organization put us in the same room anyway. That is the thing about the Realtors Land Institute I do not think I will ever get over. It does not matter if you are working a cattle ranch or a subdivision, hunting ground or a commercial corner. If land is your life, there is a seat for you, and sooner or later it sits you down next to somebody you were meant to know. For Koby and me, that turned into a way of thinking we both already had. The people come first. The land follows. Get that order right and most everything else sorts itself out. Get it backward, and it does not matter one bit how good the dirt is. That belief is the whole reason Ironhorse is here. We did not build a company and then go looking for a community to join. We came up through the community, and the company grew right out of it. But the business is not even the biggest thing this organization gave me. I met my husband at a conference too. Now we have got a baby, a few too many animals, and a life I would not trade for anything. Same hallways, same lanyards, same good people, and somehow it handed me my whole family. Koby and my husband are just two of the people I have met through RLI who changed my life. There is a long list behind them. And that is the thing I most want you to understand about this organization, and about us. It was never really about the land. It was always about the people standing on it. What It Means for You When you sell your land, or go to buy a piece, you are handing somebody the keys to one of the biggest things your family owns. The questions that decide whether that deal holds up are the ones you cannot see standing at the gate. You want a specialist on those questions. Not a generalist taking a turn at it. RLI is how you tell the difference. Membership tells you a person chose land, learned it, and put their name behind a national standard. That is the soil we grew out of, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every fence-line walk, every listing, every closing. Same standard, every single time. Frequently Asked Questions What is the Realtors Land Institute? The Realtors Land Institute, or RLI, is the land division of the National Association of Realtors. Founded in 1944, it provides education, standards, and a national network for agents and brokers who specialize in land real estate. What does it mean if my agent is an RLI member? It means the agent specializes in land rather than treating it as a sideline. RLI members pursue land-specific education through LANDU, belong to a national network of land professionals, and hold to a code of conduct under the National Association of Realtors. Is being an RLI member the same as being an ALC? No. The Accredited Land Consultant (ALC) is the highest designation a member can earn within the Realtors Land Institute. A land professional can be a knowledgeable, fully qualified RLI member without holding the ALC. Both mean the person specializes in land. Do all land agents belong to RLI? No. Most agents who occasionally sell land are not members. That is what makes membership a meaningful signal of specialization. Why should I hire a land specialist who is part of RLI? Land carries issues a residential agent is not trained to handle, from water and mineral rights to access, soil, and use restrictions. An RLI member has chosen to specialize in exactly those issues and runs with the people and education that handle them well. Thinking about selling your land, or buying a piece? Come talk to us, y'all. We came up through RLI, we hold ourselves to its standard, and we would love to walk your ground with you. You can also see what we have listed right now.

Celebrating America 250... There is something I have always loved about late summer on American ground. The light turns golden toward evening, the fields go heavy and full, and the whole country seems to lean toward celebration. This year the celebration is a grand one. America is turning two hundred and fifty, and I can think of no lovelier place to mark the occasion than out on the land itself. We tend to remember the country's birthday with fireworks and flags, with picnics and parades, and those things are wonderful. But if you look a little closer at the story of this country, you will find that it has always been, at heart, a story about land. The ground we gather on. The ground we plant. The ground we are fortunate enough to call our own and, in time, to pass along. A Country Built on Beautiful Ground I find it remarkable that some of the oldest American traditions are quiet ones, written into the land long before they were written into history books. In 1785, only a few years past that first Independence Day, the young country sat down and decided how it would measure its ground. It laid the land out in tidy squares. Six miles to a township. Thirty-six sections to a township. A neat 640 acres to a section. That careful grid is still with us. When a land broker today describes a quarter section by its place on the map, they are reading from a plan the country drew before George Washington ever took office. I think there is something rather beautiful in that. The order beneath our fields is one of the oldest American things we have, and most of us walk right over it without a thought. An Inheritance Worth Tending The chapter I love most is the one that filled in the middle of the country. In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, and the nation made an extraordinary offer. Settle on 160 acres. Build a home. Work the ground for five years, and it would be yours to keep. The families who answered that call came with very little and built something lasting. Some of the very first claims in the entire country were filed right in Nebraska. They arrived, many of them, by way of the railroad, the great iron horse that carried hopeful families west and set them down within reach of open country. The little towns that grew up along those lines became home, and have stayed home for generations. The name on our sign is a fond nod to all of it. What moves me is that so much of this ground is still in the same families. The great-grandchildren of those first homesteaders are out there today, tending land their people earned one season at a time. That is not just history. That is an inheritance, cared for and handed down, the way the very best things always are. Gathering on the Land If there is a single thing I believe in, it is the joy of gathering, and there is no finer table than the one set out of doors on a warm evening. The Fourth of July has always struck me as a holiday made for the land. We carry the food outside. We spread the quilts in the grass. We let the children run until the light goes soft, and we watch the sky together. This year, when the country celebrates America 250, our beautiful country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, I hope you will celebrate where it all began, on the ground beneath your feet. Walk the fence line at golden hour. Bring the family out to the place that has held your name for generations. There is no grander setting for an American celebration than the American land. America 250 & Beyond: Keeping It for the Next Hundred Years The most gracious thing we can do with anything we love is to care for it well and pass it along better than we found it. Land asks the same of us. It outlasts every anniversary and every one of us, and it rewards the people who tend it with patience. America 250 is a happy reminder that this country was built on good ground, by people who understood the quiet pleasure of keeping a piece of it. We spend our days alongside the families behind that land, helping them buy it, sell it, and keep it close for the next generation. On the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, I cannot think of better work, and we are grateful to do it. If your family is thinking about what comes next for your land, we would be delighted to sit down with you. It is a conversation we always welcome.