Bob Kiesling

Pursuit of higher education and better jobs lured Bob’s parents out of his hometown of Havre, Montana to Bozeman, Great Falls, Billings then back to Havre. While the family was in Billings, Bob spent a year in New Zealand as an American Field Service exchange student. He then went on to the University of Chicago for a B.S. degree, following that with an M.S. in Environmental Sciences at the University of Montana. Since the early 1990’s he has been adjunct faculty at the U. of Montana, teaching a fall semester course in Conservation Strategies to masters students in Environmental Studies.

The arc of Bob’s career(s)began working on environmental and natural resource policy issues, then segued into creating nature sanctuaries and conserving natural areas as founding executive director of the Big Sky (Montana/Wyoming) office of The Nature Conservancy.

It is impossible to do such work without becoming a land junkie. To support the land habit after his work in the non-profit field, Bob continued his life-long fascination with conservation by co-founding a for-profit real estate brokerage specializing in conservation quality land transactions. A few years later in the early 1990s he established another private company that provided real estate brokerage and conservation consulting services, with the northern Rockies and plains the geographic epicenter of the business.

In the western United States there are vast quantities of Federal land (national forests, parks, range lands etc.) and lesser quantities of State owned and managed lands, not to mention numerous Indian reservations. Given the multiplicity of agencies, their missions, public and private owners and managers, real estate agents must have excellent working knowledge of who the players are, how the various systems work, what the rules, regulations and even the unwritten customs are. Real estate agents working in rural land markets should have knowledge of water rights, access issues,fish and wildlife resources,the legal and tax aspects of land transactions. They should have a nuanced understanding of local communities….their amenities, their shortcomings, indeed their personalities.

With a working lifetime spent addressing these considerations and many more, Bob has the experience, the human networks, and the savvy to guide clients in the search for land. He regards the partnership with Dan Vermillion and Ben Pierce as the apex of a long career arc in land transactions. With many skill sets in common and many others providing complementarity, this trio of friends constitute a business alloy whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Bob can be reached at the following:
Bob@sweetwaterranches.com
406-459-4036 (cell)
406-333-7155 ext. 3 (office)