Suburbanites Pursue Ranching Life

They were risking their financial future in exchange for a patch of weed-strewn Ventura County ranchland, and their friends warned Chris and Erin Schreiber not to do it.

But the Schreibers were chasing a dream of raising a 13-acre horse ranch out of a pile of mud and rocks near Moorpark.

“We spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about everything,” Chris Schreiber recalls. “It was a big step. We would have to give up buying brand-new cars and spending summers in Hawaii. We’d be doing hard labor instead.”

Three years later, they say they have no regrets.

The story is a similar one for Phil and Gail Bellows. High school sweethearts from North Hollywood, they raised a family in Chatsworth while he ran a plumbing business and she worked at a bank.

Now, they live on a two-acre horse-breeding farm and stable near Moorpark they purchased four years ago. Ask them why they moved, and you get a simple answer.

“We didn’t like the city life anymore,” Gail Bellows said.

More recently, engineer John Griffiths, 58, traded in his Channel Islands Harbor home in Oxnard for a rolling 15-acre ranch off Wheeler Canyon Road between Ventura and Santa Paula.

Along with a six-wheel horse buggy, the farmhouse came with 30 sheep and 100 apricot trees. His daughter and two sons offered to help him start his new life as a rancher.

Griffiths, who is divorced, lives on the ranch with one of his sons. He says he likes living without neighbors 8 feet away.

“It’s not that I don’t like people,” Griffiths said. “But someone’s always getting their boat started at 7 a.m.”

As more people pack themselves into the newest sand-colored suburban housing tracts that crisscross Ventura County, those tracking the area’s housing industry say they increasingly are being joined by newcomers looking for a little more adventure.

More and more new arrivals fit the profile of the Schreibers, the Bellowses and Griffiths: dreamers without a clue of what it takes to run a farm or ranch, but determined to find out.

Ventura County real estate agent Scott Dunbar says a sizable portion of his newest clients--searching for serenity--tell him they will do whatever it takes to build a new and slower life.

“They are typically professional people who are from a metropolitan area [and] for the most part will continue to do their work there,” Dunbar said. “But they eventually would like to escape that scenario and spend every moment they can in a rural atmosphere.”

For the Schreibers, finding that lifestyle meant pulling up their Orange County roots to buy the 13-acre spread north of Moorpark that they now call FireStar Ranch.

The couple insist that every day they are moving one step closer to operating a full-service horse breeding ranch.

Like others who have made the same choice, the Schreibers--both in their late 20s--know that realizing their dream will take much more time and money. And, in the end, it could all fail. But the risks don’t scare them.

“This was always our goal,” says Erin Schreiber, who previously worked for a Los Angeles public relations firm. “We wanted to have horses, to have land.”

For less than $400,000 in 1999, the couple got the horse ranch equivalent of a blank and battered canvas. The underground water pipeline was rusted out and cracked. When it rained, a steady trickle of water came through the roof of the metal barn. The paint was peeling and the faucets leaked at their small ranch house.

Two of the first purchases the Schreibers made after they moved in were a John Deere 870 tractor and Smoothy, a chestnut quarter horse. He had ridden a horse a few times before, but never a tractor.

“I guess I had a general idea how to drive it,” he said. “But how to really run it? No, not really.”

Nearly two years later, the couple are still climbing out of debt. So far, they have pumped an additional $200,000 into the property. Slowly, however, they are starting to see results.

Today, the Schreibers have new stables with room to board 22 horses. They also have built three horse-training rings. And they have opened up their new spread to a Western-style riding contest sponsored by a mounted shooting club.

“Every step of the way we sat down and did a lot of research,” said Chris Schreiber, a USC business school graduate who continues to work as a commercial real estate appraiser while running his ranch.

Along the way, he asked himself some hard questions.

“Am I going to make an adequate return? And if I spend $10,000 on a horse arena, am I going to make some money back? Not yet, but hopefully someday.”

Erin Schreiber says the horse stables and the training rings were a childhood dream. On her first date with Chris she told him what she wanted.

“And he said that’s great,” she said. “Now we want to create a place where people can get away from the day-to-day life.”

Purchasing ranchland in Ventura County and creating a successful business is a risky proposition, says John Karevoll, a commercial and residential property analyst who has studied the county’s changing housing market.

Sometimes the sewer lines stretching out to the farm country are old, if they work at all, Karevoll said. The price of a lot with suitable space for horses--between two and 20 acres--is usually well above the county’s median housing price of $255,000.

Getting the property through the tangle of municipal code regulations can seem like an endless nightmare, he added. But taking the financial risks also has its rewards.

“It’s guys like this that could lose everything or they could walk away millionaires,” Karevoll said. “It’s the nature of raw land. If we were to take a look at 100 people in Ventura County who have recently bought ranch property, 70 of them will look back in five years and say what a good move, a good call.”

Gail and Phil Bellows knew the risk and took it anyway.

They received a family inheritance and used that toward buying their ranch for $290,000 in 1997 after selling their Chatsworth home. The two-acre property is now worth nearly $800,000.

Phil Bellows converted an old goat barn into an office. From there, the Bellowses continue to supervise the plumbing business with a crew of workers doing commercial projects up and down the state, while also overseeing their ranch. They also breed show horses.

“You just don’t know what it took to get out here,” Phil Bellows said. “In order to buy this place we had to sell our motor home, our Starbucks stock. And then people were saying to us, ‘I wish I could do it.’ And I’d say, then get off your butt and do it.”

Sandwiched between thick orange groves and rows of eucalyptus trees, the Bellows horse stable includes breeding pens in front, a high-tech stable in back and a training ring. Gail Bellows handles much of the bookkeeping. Phil Bellows buys and sells horses using the Internet.

The small ranch is only a 30-minute drive from their old neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, but Gail Bellows said it seems like another world.

For John Griffiths, it just made financial sense to move from his Channel Islands Harbor home.

He built the house for $120,000 two decades ago and sold it for $874,000 earlier this year. He moved into his small farmhouse in June.

His 18-year-old son wants to open a skateboard park on the ranch. Another son is taking agriculture courses in college and wants to tend to the grove of apricot trees. His daughter is studying to become a veterinarian and has expressed interest in taking care of the sheep, he said.

Griffiths plans to raise apricot trees and can fruit.

“I might decide in two years I don’t like it, but I’m playing it by ear,” he said. “It gives me a little space. . . I might be fooling myself, but with the kids pitching in, I’ll be OK.”