Why Families Sell Their Hunting Land

Maybe it was Grandpa's 80 acres in Mecosta County. Maybe it was a family woodlot in the Thumb that your dad and his brothers hunted every November. The story often ends the same.

Somebody dies, the estate gets split. One sibling wants to sell, but others can't afford the taxes. A third lives in Phoenix now and doesn't care about deer hunting.

So the land goes on the market, and then it's gone. And the family can’t buy it back.

This is happening to families all over Michigan, and it's quietly reshaping who hunts, where they hunt, and whether they hunt at all.

Michigan recently passed the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in 2025 to try to slow down forced sales of inherited family land. That tells you how bad the problem already was. For decades, families without wills have been losing property to partition sales: One heir forces a sale, and everyone else loses the property.

But even when the family holds it together, the economics have shifted. In the counties where most of us hunt, land runs $5,000 to $7,000 an acre. That would put a 40-acre plot of hunting land in the ballpark of $280,000. That’s hard for locals to pay taxes on, and even harder for locals to be able to purchase.

Who's buying plots of land with no structures for nearly $300,000? Not local husbands, fathers, and hunters. It’s often out-of-state buyers from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio who buy up big chunks of Michigan's rural land.
It’s also investors building lease portfolios, or suburbanites buying getaways they'll use a few weekends a year. Your family's land probably isn't going to a neighbor's kid. It’s going to another baby boomer who’s not from the area.

So when you can't buy hunting land, you lease. Except that lease rates keep climbing. Michigan is typically around $20 per acre, but Midwest rates broadly have jumped to $50, $60, even $80 an acre on better hunting land. A hunting lease in decent deer country might run $2,000 to $4,000 a season. Our dads didn't pay rent like this to hunt.

Hunting clubs don't fix this either. Michigan has a long tradition of guys pooling money in hunt clubs or cooperatives, which was typically a few buddies or family members splitting a lease or buying a piece together. That used to be a great workaround.

But when a basic hunting shack on a 40-acre parcel in the middle of nowhere costs north of $360,000, most people can’t add that on top of a mortgage or rent. And taxes keep rising. Even the clubs are getting squeezed. Dues are going up, and the younger generations can't swing the rise in cost of living along with this.

What happens as a result of this is predictable. People who used to hunt private land are now forced to hunt on public.

The good news is that Michigan has about 4.6 million acres of state-owned land and another 3.6 million federal acres, one of the largest public hunting bases east of the Mississippi.

This sounds great until you realize the Lower Peninsula, where most hunters live, has far less of it.

And the accessible spots are getting hammered by all of the other hunters who have been pushed off their old hunting spots, and who now have access to smartphones and apps, like OnX, that help them locate good public land hunting spots.

Anyone who's hunted state land in the northern Lower Peninsula on Nov. 15 knows this well. Public-land hunting is often filled with trucks bumper to bumper on two-tracks, blaze orange every 100 yards, and deer scrambling all over the place because of all the hunters and gunfire.

Here's where it gets worse. Michigan deer license buyers dropped from 871,678 in 1995 to 593,934 in 2023, a 32% decline. The DNR's Wildlife Division runs on $42.5 million, funded mostly by license fees and federal Pittman-Robertson dollars tied to license sales. Fewer hunters means less money for habitat, management, and enforcement.

License fees haven't increased since 2014. Inflation has eaten 37 percent of their value. The DNR's Wildlife Division chief told the Natural Resources Commission the agency is "functioning on duct tape and a dream."

The cycle: lose private land, move to public, find it crowded, quit hunting, conservation loses funding, public land suffers, more people quit.

So what do we do about it?

Florida just passed a bill through their House to eliminate most homestead property taxes, and it’s now headed to a 2026 ballot. The idea is simple: stop taxing people out of what they own.

Michigan should be paying attention. A family holding 40 acres of hardwoods in Northern Michigan isn't sitting on a gold mine. They're sitting on a tax bill that gets harder to pay every year while wages stay flat. Eventually, they are forced to sell, usually to someone from out of state with a bigger checkbook.

If Lansing cut the property tax burden on rural land (or all Michigan property for that matter), maybe young Michigan families would be more able to participate in the kind of Michigan their parents were able to.

It won't undo 30 years of sell-offs. But it might stop the next one from being your family's.