A sprawling Kern County ranch once owned by country music legend Buck Owens has hit the market for $5.9 million, giving buyers a shot at more than 124 acres of land north of Bakersfield, including roughly 84 acres of producing pistachio orchards. The property at 16208 Zerker Road comes with a nearly 7,000-square-foot home, a private fishing lake, a tennis court and a six-car garage.
The listing, first reported by SFGATE, hit the market the week before November 1, according to the outlet. Marketing materials from Coldwell Banker Homes describe the estate simply as property once owned by the legendary Buck Owens, with an asking price of $5,900,000 and a residence listed at 6,944 square feet. A separate listing from Movoto describes the nearly 7,000-square-foot home as featuring three en-suite bedrooms, an office with built-ins, an oversized game room and three additional bathrooms.
Beyond the main house, the Movoto listing details a separate one-bedroom pool house, a heated pool with a spillover spa, an outdoor kitchen, a tennis court and the private fishing lake. The same listing notes more than 470 paid solar panels and an approximately 6,000-square-foot shop on the grounds. Per SFGATE's reporting, the property also includes a four-stall barn, a six-car garage and two private wells.
A Ranch With Roots Going Back to 1970
Owens purchased 120 acres about 18 miles north of Bakersfield in 1971, according to SFGATE, after leaving his family home on Panorama Drive following his divorce from his second wife, Phyllis Buford. Jim Shaw, a former keyboardist with Owens' band the Buckaroos who now directs the Buck Owens Private Foundation, told the outlet that Owens actually purchased and moved onto the ranch in late 1970. Shaw recalled the ranch's original two-bedroom adobe home as a great house but terribly impractical, describing it to SFGATE as a non-insulated adobe with handmade wooden window sills and rough-sawn wood.
That original adobe included a small kitchen, one large room, a 10-foot fireplace, a bedroom and a small maid's room, per SFGATE's account. Owens later added a large bedroom, a five-car garage, tennis courts and a pool. He also built a home on the property for his sister, Dorothy Owens, who lived there until her death from cancer in 1995. Neither Dorothy's ranch home nor the original adobe structure is still standing today — the current ranch house, SFGATE reports, was built years after Owens died in 2006.
The Listing Agent Stayed Quiet
Jonathan Busby, the listing agent for the Zerker Road property, told SFGATE that the current owners asked him not to comment to the press about the ranch. That leaves most of the public record resting on the listing details themselves and on Shaw's recollections of the land's early days under Owens.
Owens, a pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound, racked up No. 1 hit records throughout the 1960s, had a song covered by the Beatles, and released a smash-hit live album recorded at Carnegie Hall, according to SFGATE. He was later inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He also lived for years in a house on Bakersfield's Panorama Drive overlooking the San Joaquin Valley before decamping to the ranch, and he gave spare time and money to fighting cancer — telling the Sapulpa Daily Herald in 1977 that he believed people and government action could help defeat the disease. He died on March 25, 2006, at age 76, as SFGATE reported.
Second Piece of the Owens Legacy on the Market
The Zerker Road ranch is the second major remnant of Owens' physical property to become available, SFGATE notes, following the Crystal Palace, the Bakersfield venue Owens built as the West Coast's answer to the Grand Ole Opry. The Crystal Palace hosted country performers including Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks over the years, and Brooks reportedly proposed to Trisha Yearwood there, according to SFGATE's reporting. The venue closed a little more than a year before November 1, 2026, per the outlet's account.
Pricing on the Crystal Palace has shifted over time and across reports. SFGATE states the venue was initially listed for $7.5 million and has a current asking price of $5.75 million, with a building size of 21,354 square feet. That figure contrasts with an earlier account from SFGATE's 2024 coverage, which described an 18,000-square-foot venue listed for roughly $7 million at the time. A more recent report from the San Joaquin Valley Sun described a petition to protect the Crystal Palace from demolition amid purchase rumors.
For comparison, Owens' former family home on Panorama Drive — where he lived from 1968 to 1974 — has also been listed for sale, described by Bakersfield Now as a 5,100-square-foot home on nearly one acre in northeast Bakersfield, complete with guest and in-law quarters and a detached building Owens once used for music rehearsals. Between that house, the Crystal Palace and now the Zerker Road ranch, much of the physical footprint Owens built across Kern County is quietly changing hands, decades after he first staked his claim on the land.
