Written by HLRBO Staff|
Last updated
Over the twelve months ending October 2, hunters filed 19,971 requests through HLRBO's Lease Finder, each one naming the state where they wanted ground that was not yet listed. Set those requests against the listings that actually exist and the American hunting map develops a hot zone: in Georgia, requests outnumber active listings 44 to 1; in Louisiana, 42 to 1; in South Carolina and Alabama, 31 to 1. In Kentucky, HLRBO's deepest inventory state, the ratio is 5 to 1. The demand is not evenly spread. Neither is the opportunity.
Listing counts tell you where landowners have decided to lease. Request counts tell you where hunters are standing with money and nowhere to put it. We have never published the second number before. A note on how to read it: a single request can name more than one state, so these are requests naming each state, not unique hunters, and the comparison is to active, approved private listings on the platform as of October 2.
The Deep South is the hot zone
Rank states by requests per active listing and five Southern states run away with it. Georgia drew 2,319 requests against 53 listings. Louisiana, 971 against 23. South Carolina, 972 against 31. Alabama, 1,346 against 43. Mississippi, 1,093 against 47, about 23 per listing. Then a second tier where demand still swamps supply: Pennsylvania at 23 requests per listing, Tennessee at 22, North Carolina at 20, Florida at 18.
Texas is a different animal. It generated the most requests in the country, 3,662, against the most listings, 262, for a ratio of 14. That is a big, busy, functioning market. Georgia is a big, busy market with almost no shelves.
At the other end sit the states where searching listings usually works: Kentucky at 5 requests per listing (1,286 against 252), Michigan and New York at roughly 6, Wisconsin at 6. These are the places where HLRBO's inventory has had years to build and where a hunter with a budget can generally find ground by looking.
Why the South runs short
Part of it is land tenure. Much of the Southern hunting ground that leases has leased for decades through hunt clubs and timber company permits, arrangements that rarely surface on an open marketplace and that are consolidating as timber companies merge. Part of it is culture: a Georgia landowner's first instinct is still the neighbor's club, not a listing. And part of it is simply that the platform's field network grew up in the Midwest and Northeast first.
None of that changes the arithmetic for the landowner holding 200 acres of pines and bottomland in Dooly County this month. Somewhere between two and three thousand hunters have told HLRBO, in writing, that they want ground in Georgia, with budgets, party sizes, dates, and in many cases a willingness to carry insurance and pass a background check. The queue is the longest in the country relative to what is listed. A new listing there does not enter a crowded market. It enters an empty one.
What a request actually contains
The reason this data is usable, rather than just interesting, is what a Lease Finder request holds. Hunters specify the state and county, the species, the acreage range, the number in their party, their price range, an approximate start date, and whether they want a season, a year, or a short rental. We walked through how the feature works on the hunter side earlier this month. On the landowner side, it means the demand in your county is not a guess. It is a stack of specific asks that HLRBO's team can bring to you before you have written a single word of a listing.
The map for both sides
For hunters, the demand map is a candid guide to where searching will and will not work. In Kentucky, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin, set a good search alert and be patient. In Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Mississippi, file a Lease Finder request, be specific about the county, and price it to market, because the listing you want probably does not exist yet and someone has to go ask for it.
For landowners, the map is the rarest kind of market signal: documented, located, unmet demand. The states where hunters most outnumber listings are the states where a new listing has the least competition and the most waiting buyers. Deer season is open across the South. The hunters are already in the queue.
Landowners in the states above can see the demand for themselves: listing on HLRBO is free, and the team will bring matching Lease Finder requests to a new listing. List your property. Hunters in short-supply states can file a Lease Finder request.