Everyone for joining us today for the Midwest IDEAS Investor Conference. I'm Phillip Cooper with Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation comes from Alico, which trades on the Nasdaq Exchange under the ticker symbol ALCO. Presenting from the company today is John Kiernan, Chief Executive Officer. John.
Thank you, Phillip, and thank you all for taking time to join us for our presentation today. We'll go through a set of slides, and then we'll do some Q&A, and I'm happy to discuss anything afterwards if anybody's got some specific questions. We've got some eye candy for the lawyers we're going to wet up here for a second. Alico is a public company. We just said that. We've been public since 1960. Went public on the pink sheets, believe it or not, back in the day. We were one of the original Nasdaq-listed companies in 1972, but our history goes back even further. We're in business for about 130 years. It started out always as a land company, but it's evolved over time based on the needs of our market. Back when we started, the needs of the market was Florida.
We started out as a railroad company that turned into a timber company, that turned into a citrus company that went basically vertical with the citrus industry, and we've now evolved today into basically a modern agricultural company with some residential and commercial real estate aspirations. But what we've always done is down on the bottom, which is we've seeked to provide you, the investor, with the benefits and stability of what conventional agriculture represents, as well as the optionality that comes with active land management. The active land management is monetizing at attractive prices to the right buyers. You'll see everything that we own is in the state of Florida. Everybody got excited last time we were at the IDEAS conference when we showed this slide because they think that everything in the shaded is what we own. We don't own that.
We own the little orange parts within each of these seven counties. We're illustrating the seven counties, otherwise we'd be worth about $400 trillion if we own that much real estate. The little orange boxes inside the seven counties, 47,300 acres in 27 different locations. The 27 different locations is actually a huge competitive advantage for us. Diversifies us and our operations against weather, but also gives us different upside potential as each of these land locations develops at its own different course and speed. The one unifying tie over the past 130 years was not necessarily our business model, but it was our conservation-oriented DNA. We've always tried to be a good steward of everything that we owned, and all that we owned was land. So we provide as much encouragement as we can for our neighbors. We try to be good corporate citizens.
We've always been really tied to the environment and trying to be good stewards for all the conservation land that we have. Most recently, we've sold almost 40,000 acres to the state of Florida between 2017 and 2024 that they're using for wildlife space, conservation areas, parks, things like that. We donated the land, if you're familiar with Florida Gulf Coast University, that became the tenth university as part of the State of Florida's university system. Most recently, we put up $5 million of our own money to build a wildlife crossing that goes across a major highway. We have a little bit of an interest in making sure that that goes well. We'll talk about that in a second. It truly is putting our money where our mouth is, where we're not looking for an immediate return. A lot of smiling faces.
You should recognize at least one of them, but the guy in the middle is the most important. The guy in the middle is a man named Mitch Hutchcraft. Mitch is a rezoning, in Florida, we call it entitlement. He is an entitlement expert in the state of Florida. What his claim to fame is he works with agricultural companies like ourselves, where all of our land is basically titled or zoned properly everywhere we own it for agricultural purposes and helps us basically get approvals to turn it into something else. You need permission from federal, state, and local governments if you're going to do anything other than what you're approved for. Mitch has been doing that for about 40 years. Most recently, we hired him a couple of years ago from King Ranch.
The reason that's extremely relevant is the largest rezoning project that we're currently working on, King Ranch, had a very similar project literally adjacent to us, right next door, and Mitch was the guy who quarterbacked that for 15 years. We have huge institutional knowledge that Mitch brought with him on how to get things done in the real estate system within the state of Florida. All the right people, the right order of operations, how to establish some credibility, his reputation. In addition to just being a terrific guy, he is an extremely competent professional, and he is a core part of our real estate strategy. Why is that important? Because our legacy over that 130 years, really, as an agricultural producer evolved to where we were the largest producer of citrus fruit, that would be oranges, for the orange juice market in the U.S.
At one point, we were growing oranges on 5.5 million trees. We were the largest producer for Tropicana. They were our major customer. Everything went great until a disease weakened our trees. More importantly, two hurricanes came in within a couple of years of each other in 2022 and 2024, and really devastated those weakened trees to the point where they were not producing enough fruit to be economically viable for us. Remember we said 5.5 million trees. You have basically a fixed cost base to take care of them every day, and then you would harvest the fruit at the end of the year. The diminished production was causing economic losses for the company.
We were able to actually hold our breath and cross our fingers for one year. By the end of 2024, it became pretty clear that production was not going to rebound to the point where there would be economic sufficiency. We made the very difficult decision to exit as a producer of oranges. We got out of operating as a citrus producer, really to focus on how we can get highest and best use from our land ourselves. Recognizing that the land was truly what the assets of the company were. It was not necessarily our market share, which was diminishing. It wasn't just us. We think we were actually the best growers in the state of Florida. We just were no longer able to make it economically viable.
Instead, we focused on a development strategy where we spent a lot of time and looked at every acre of land that we held and tried to determine what its highest and best use would be ultimately, and then how long it would take to get there, and potentially what it could be monetized for. Then we discounted all that back into a model that allowed us to basically categorize every asset that we had into three buckets. The first bucket was something that we called basically the five years, and that meant that we thought that we had acres that could be developed within the first five years. The second bucket was also going to be developable, but it would just be outside of five years, could take 5- 15.
Everything else outside of that 15 to 20 year window, we just considered to keep in the agricultural bucket. We've got five years, we've got after five years, and then we've got 75% of the land that stayed in the agricultural bucket. That allowed us to actually put a price tag. Management was able to estimate that the value of our assets in present value dollars today, discounted between 10% and 15%, was somewhere between $650 million and $750 million. Why is this relevant? Because the stock itself was trading for about $200 million back then. Currently, it's trading for about $300 million today. We've done a decent job of narrowing the valuation gap, but we still have a ways to go to achieve what we consider true market value for these assets.
We're just going to continue to execute according to our plan and get there a little at a time. These are current numbers. We refreshed this analysis a few months ago, and some of the variables have changed, but we are making a good effort to try to narrow that valuation gap for you, the investors. A plan for every acre is the system that we just described, but the first line is the most important, that this is an ongoing process. We're constantly looking at comparable transactions that are in our vicinity. We're constantly looking at the market. We're reevaluating all of our assumptions. We're looking at our discount rates, and we're truly trying to provide you, the investors, with the best guess of what management estimates the value for these lands are going to be.
We have not provided our homework because several people asked for that. "Why don't you just give us your model?" We're going to keep that as proprietary information, but the way we constructed it is we did bring in outsiders. We had appraisers, we had market experts, we had people in the industry, real estate research professionals that actually helped us with all of those key assumptions. We went all the way out 20 or 30 years, month by month, trying to figure out exactly when we can get approvals, if it was going to be rezoned, and how we can monetize it at that point based on what the lot value would be, depending on what the density per acre of how many houses you're allowed to put on an acre. It wasn't just a simple swag that we did on the back of an envelope.
It was a little more technical than people probably give us credit for, but it is a moving target. It goes up and down depending on what comparable companies do, and we're going to try to keep it fresh. But right now, $650-$750 is kind of where we think our market value for our assets would be in present value dollars today. Let's talk about that first bucket, because that does seem to be everybody's favorite topic of conversation. The crown jewel is the one on the far bottom here, and that's in Collier County. It's at the very top of Collier County. Collier, if you're familiar with Florida, is the county where Naples, Florida is actually located in. Naples is, I hate saying this, the Beverly Hills of Florida. No, you could say West Palm is probably that, but a very, very popular high-end area.
Very beautiful. It's right on the coast in the Gulf. This is inland. This is obviously in the corner of the county itself. The plan is we're going to build a master plan community there, probably approaching somewhere of 9,000 doors, and it'll have a whole bunch of commercial space and a lot of open space and community amenities. On 4,660 acres, that would be the crown jewel that we're going to spend a good bit of time talking about today. Several other properties are currently under the entitlement process as well. Highlands County, a little further north. We've got a grove that we've converted over. It's going to rezoning right now. It's about 600 acres. Again, it's going to be houses. No commercial, but it's going to have some houses. In Polk County, we have a Saddlebag Grove. The grove part should give it away.
We've converted it from oranges. It's about 240 acres, and that's proceeding along with the entitlements as well. Hendry County, we have a very small parcel. It's about 80 acres. It's outside the town of LaBelle, and we anticipate that that actually will probably get sold possibly by definitely 2027-ish, assuming we get approvals coming at the end of 2026. It's a smaller, simpler property for us to actually entitle. A little further up north in Polk County, we've got 42 acres. A good bit of that land is along a lake, so it's got lake frontage that we anticipate houses would be very well suited for on those lake frontage acres. Corkscrew, the crown jewel I was mentioning, is going to be split into two pieces.
You see on the chart here, we've got our yellow lines that go everywhere, but on one side, and I have a little more detail. We've got East Village, which again, is going to be very similar to what the West Village is going to be from an acre and a commercial space perspective. It's going to have basically a good intersection on Route 82 in a place called Corkscrew Road. It has a lot of details currently approved at the county level. We got approval at the county level in April of 2026 for the East Village. There's two other forms of approval that we need. The first is at the state level, particularly for water usage. We're going to approve the entire project because the details of how many houses and where is not relevant for that.
The entire project at the state level would get approved, we're hoping, fingers crossed, the end of this year or the very beginning of next. Then ultimately, we need federal approval, specifically related to endangered species impact. The Florida panther is a very special protected animal, and this is part of its habitat. We've taken a number of steps, which we'll get to in a second, to provide protections for this critical issue. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are responsible for approving all these plans, and it'll be the entire project.
Once this gets approved and houses start to go up and things start to move, we anticipate that we would finalize the details of what goes where as far as houses and such in the mix on the west side for the same process, but the federal and the state would already be approved, so it'd really just be a local approval at that time. That sounds really confusing, but suffice to say, the east side locally is approved, and we're working with the federal and state right now to get the approvals at that level. The conservation strategy that I said was part of our DNA is critical to this approval process because the panthers are so basically protected and sacred. It's very difficult to get new development projects basically approved down where, particularly in Collier County.
25 years ago, there was a program that was designed within the county itself called the Rural Land Stewardship Program. Effectively what that does is it allows a landowner, like Alico, within the county to basically have the right to build within certain areas of the county, so they've got some good corridors where they want development to happen, in exchange for giving up building rights or development rights in other parts of property within the county that you also own. It's kind of a quid pro quo of you can build here according to the county if you're willing to give up all your building rights on other parts of land that you own in the county.
We were one of the first companies to actually participate in this. We had pledged back in 2008 a good chunk of some property that we own a little further down. It is the hatched lines over on the side into what we call a sending area, SSA11, that basically we restricted ourselves but never officially transferred. We did the transfer of those credits to get the permission from the county commission back in April. That was great. There are additional credits that we are seeking that we are going to do on the property itself that are going to give us sufficient credits, as well as the first property that we had just talked about. Felda Grove is the name of the property.
When all is said and done, that should give us all the permissions that we need, all that quid pro quo kind of transactions from the county to basically build exactly the plans that we are discussing. Most importantly, a key part of this provision is about 1,500 acres of the 4,600 acres we just described is going to be designated as a Florida panther habitat area that is going to connect one wildlife preserve to another. So it truly is the spirit of what everyone has been seeking, which is protecting the species, allowing development to still happen in a responsible way, and basically being beautiful. We think this is going to work very well.
To facilitate that even further, the $5 million wildlife crossing that we had actually spent money on that I talked about at the top of our presentation, is actually going to connect underneath the major highway on Route 82, that wildlife preserve into our property, into that Florida panther area. We are a little ahead of schedule. We have no approvals. There is no quid pro quo as far as that goes. But we put our good, hard-earned money to work to basically create this wildlife crossing because we feel so strongly about this project, and we are willing to actually put our money on the table to do that. The villages themselves in a little more detail. The blue is the east that we were talking about. The gray on the far side of the page is actually that Florida panther corridor I just described.
The orange is going to be the West Village, which again is going to have additional detail as we get a little further down the path. Bonnet Lake is the next property we just discussed. It is the larger one of everything else. Again, it is about 600 acres. Probably does not have any endangered species issues, so it is a little simpler as far as the entitlement process. We are still working locally to get approvals, but we are very optimistic that hopefully this could get resolved in the next year or so. Plant World was the smaller property. It is about 80 acres. Again, potentially could have 250 homes. There are other home developments in the vicinity, so we think that this is actually a relatively easy transfer once it is entitled. But we have to wait for that approval, and hopefully that is at the end of this year.
Then we talked about our Saddlebag Grove, which is a little further north. Again, it should be about 240 acres, and potentially have 400, 450 type houses. Then the Lake Buffum is the waterfront property that I discussed. I showed you where the lake is around there, and that is probably where we are going to get some road frontage. Okay. All that said and done, why we are here talking today. All the entitlements are taking time. In the meantime, what we have not chatted about for the last few minutes is all that agricultural land. That 75% of what we own, which is about 33,000 acres, clearly has a value. Everything that we own today is leased out to other agricultural operators, so it is generating some form of income.
In the event that there are opportunities for us to sell the agricultural land at attractive pricing to the right buyers who are going to keep it in agriculture, we would take advantage of that, and we have done $90+ million over the last 18 months. We anticipated that when we created the model, that it was somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 per acre for that bundle. We sold it basically at $9,000+ per acre. Does that mean that we lowballed and everything else in the portfolio is worth nine? No, I am not going to say that, but we did actually raise the estimate to about $5,000 to $6,000 an acre. So that goes from our own comps perspective. But more importantly, we think that the value of agricultural land is holding strong, and we think the land that we do own actually is competitive, and time will tell.
But we are not having a fire sale. We are not in a rush. We have enough liquidity that we can ride out any of these market fluctuations that you may read about from time to time. Because ultimately, our job as a management team at Alico is to return this capital to you, the shareholders. That sounds all well and good, but I will put my track record on the line. I have been with the company since 2015. Since 2015, we have returned almost $209 million. We have done that primarily through common dividends. We just completed a share buyback program, the first $10 million of a $50 million tranche. We have repaid voluntarily $120 million worth of our debt, and we have also done a $25 million tender offer. So as we get disposable cash flow, it is going back to you, the investor's pocket, and that, we think, drives value.
Our strategic vision is simpler. We are not fighting mother nature right now with a citrus operation that is dependent on navigating through weather patterns or fighting a vicious terminal disease. Instead, we have the ability to lease our own land, to get lease revenue from a variety of diversified partners, but also to basically spend a lot of time and resources figuring out how we can continue to deliver the highest and best use for every acre that we own. So we keep our head up. We try to remain optimistic. But the fact that 75% of our land could be sold at attractive prices without any further rezoning gives us a lot of flexibility. Right now, we are sitting on a pretty good amount of cash. Our foundation itself, we have got a management team that has been in place. Like I said, I have been here 11 years.
We have 13 people at the company today because we have restructured over the last couple of years. Our CFO has been with us for three. Mitch Hutchcraft, most importantly, has only been with us for a couple, but he has built a 40-year career doing what he does better than anybody else in the state. We have talked about delivering that capital back to you, but we also discuss there is really not a lot of pure comparable companies that I could point to as far as benchmarking us against multiples or growth rates or so on and so forth. Happy to talk offline if you have got ideas, and I can give you the compare and contrast relatively quickly. But we believe that the market value of our assets against the market value of our stock is somewhat disconnected, and my job is to narrow that gap over time.
We are going to continue to basically be responsible with the land management by not doing anything shortsighted and taking full advantage of basically the reputation that we have been able to develop over 130 years as being good, responsible stewards within the conservation movement within Florida. We announced our earnings a couple weeks ago. Through the first nine months, we did close to $24 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our cash balance at the end of the first nine months was a little more than $55 million, which is significantly up. We have net debt right now of about $29 million, which, again, was an improvement over the fiscal year end of September of last year. We are opportunistic selling land, and that land goes back to the balance sheet as far as cash goes.
So far this year, we have done, oh, about $34.5 million worth of land sales. What that translates into is for the rest of the year, we believe that we will finish with at least $15 million. We do not have a lot of revenue coming in, but with expenses going out, we think at least 15 of EBITDA. We think we should have cash close, but not at $50 million, so we are saying 48. We think net debt is probably going to be around 37. With that, I will see if we have got any questions. Sir.
Yeah. To the portfolio that is exposed to agriculture, can you give us more color on specifically the uses or is that ranch or what is going on? Because I know citrus is pretty much.
We have several parties that have stepped into our shoes for the citrus trees that are still viable. They are basically leasing that land to do some salvage or some citrus, but it is probably 5%-10% of the acres that we have. Primarily, our land is being leased by vegetable farmers, sod harvesters, and cattle ranchers. Those are primarily the drivers. We also have 3,200 acres that we announced in June, is being leased right now to a sugar company. Sugar is the other agricultural asset that is doing very well in southwest Florida. Sir?
Was all that land growing oranges before, and you found new homes for it just over the last couple of years?
Yes, and almost. Yes. The question is, was all that land growing citrus? We were growing citrus on 54,000 acres a year and a half ago. Finding different uses was us evolving our business and leasing out. We had 15,000 acres up until May that was leased out to other people that were doing the last harvest for citrus, and the results were not strong enough for them to renew because the trees were deteriorating too fast based on disease and the weakness. I think we are down to probably 3,000 or 4,000 acres tops. It is just unfortunately, the evolution of how the industry has turned so quickly and our ability to pivot, I hate the word, but to basically change our business model to adapt to the environment that we are facing today. Sir?
Does the $650 to $750 land value, does that include development expense, corporate expense, and all the other expenses that go into creating the land value?
It does not, because we don't anticipate any capital being required to get to the entitled value. So it's purely just entitled. There's no infrastructure that's built into that, so that would just be the entitled value of the land when it's entitled, discounted back to the present value today. If we decided to go into the development world and want to put infrastructure in place with water and sewer, or we're going to build roads or any of that, the price points would probably go up, but our capital needs would go up as well, and it would just be a slightly different set of analyses that right now we're not planning for or contemplating, but we're prepared, but we're not there yet. Over here, do we have any questions? Oh, sorry. Third hand. You're back.
Yeah. Kind of given the Frostproof, Florida, what are some of the economic assumptions, like from a macro perspective, that you're looking for to realize some of that middle state land turned into house and the like? Also, just to make sure I understand, you're looking to sell this for development, correct, or not developing yourself, right?
Yeah, so the price that we're assuming is the entitled value, whether we developed it the next day or sold it to another party the next day. It's just the entitled value. We've been very clear that we, as a board, are maintaining optionality to either, once it's entitled, sell it to a developer. So fee simple, they take it. Bring some team in-house to develop it ourselves over however long it takes to develop a town, or partner with the national or regional home builders to do that the same way. We could talk offline about preferences and so on, but right now that number is agnostic. It's just the entitled value to be able to prepare for that. Regarding Frostproof, Florida, it's a very special place. Primarily, the Frostproof acres would be in the agricultural bucket right now.
We're not assuming you're going to get massive development in Frostproof in the near term.
But that development is mostly Collier County?
It is Collier, it is Highlands, primarily there. Yes, sir?
Thanks, John. How important is the Florida panther green light that you might need? I assume that requires some EPA approvals. Does that need to get done before there is a change in party controlling EPA? Is there like a window there?
Second guy that asked me that today. We are not dependent on the federal administration. We are dependent on the federal staff that is working through the rules and regulations that are already established as law. To the best of my knowledge, the EPA, this is really determined by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers actually measuring it through. We cannot make it go any faster. Anecdotally, we have heard that the DOGE effect is not speeding anything up for us. Hopefully, that does not continue after midterms where this gets even worse. We are dealing with people that are doing the best they can with limited resources, and we cannot do anything until we get final federal approval.
And best guess, I know you mentioned, what, two years?
Most likely.
Right there where it could be.
Right. Can I answer any other questions today? Well, with that, I'd like to thank you all for your time and your attention and your continued support of Alico. Happy to chat afterwards. Have a good day.