Hunting Leases are common in Texas, but your lease document should be as unique as your farm or ranch. Working with San Antonio Lawyer Nathaniel Gilbert to draft your hunting lease will help protect you and your property.
Owning any number of acres of land in Texas usually comes with many questions regarding hunting and recreational use, whether you as the landowner are a hunter or not. Hunting leases in Texas are a prevalent and lucrative option for those farmers and ranchers willing to allow sportsmen and women onto their property to hunt wild game from doves and ducks to deer and exotics. While this may seem an easy opportunity for extra income for what already exists on your property, landowners should be careful to consider the following:
What Kind of Hunting Will Be Allowed on My Land?
This question will have all kinds of answers, and those answers will entirely depend on 1) what you are comfortable with and 2) what exists on your property. For the latter, it is simply a matter of looking at what you may have available on your property—A piece of property without ponds or river access or crop fields will likely not attract many duck hunters.
It goes without saying that leasing a property for hunting should come with some kind of assurance on the part of the landowner that there is game of the type considered on the property, and opportunity exists to hunt these animals. Just because you have acreage with some woods and open pastures, does not necessarily mean you have a huntable population of deer on the property.
Attorney Nathaniel Gilbert in San Antonio is an avid hunter and outdoorsman, and uses his unique background in the outdoors industry to help landowners, farmers, and ranchers draft hunting leases that maximize protection for their family and their land.
The other part of the question is a much more complex answer: what kind of hunting are you comfortable with on your property? If your property is less than 50 acres, and your home or farming operation sits in one corner of the property and you run a few cows on the other, it may not be in your best interest to allow rifle hunting on the property. Similarly, if your property backs up against a school or neighborhood, constant shotgun reports from dove or duck hunters may not make good neighbors.
When I work with a client looking to lease their property for hunting, one of the biggest things we talk about is what kinds of hunting they want to have or are comfortable with on their property. This is a huge consideration and one of the main reasons why we advocate so hard against using a form lease from the internet with no specific clauses regarding what is allowed or is not. Being able to work with your attorney to craft a specific hunting lease for your Texas property is immensely important—those specific clauses stating what kinds of hunting methods and means are allowed on your land will be the rule book anyone hunting your property has to follow, and it is critical those rules are well drafted.
If you have property in Texas that you would like to lease for hunting, contact San Antonio Attorney Nathaniel Gilbert for the best in Hunting Lease representation. Click Here to read more about hunting leases.