About
Kevin Jordan, CAI
For more than twenty years I have sold land at auction — hundreds of auctions as manager and as part of the auction team, tens of thousands of acres — for families, trusts, estates, corporations, banks, and utility companies, as a broker and auctioneer with Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, Inc.
Most of the people who call me have never sold land before and want to talk to someone that can guide them through the process. They inherited a farm, they're settling a parent's estate, they're the trustee who wants to get it right, or they're ready to retire from farming. My job is to carry the whole thing: help set realistic expectations, put the plan in writing, take care of title work and surveys, run the marketing and the auction, and shake your hand after everything is done and closed. Auction is the lead tool but not the only one — I handle private treaty listings when they fit, and I work with utility companies buying and selling land. Not all of it is farm ground either: water, oil and gas, and mineral rights, mining ground and reclamation land, and standing timber have all come across my desk, and some of the largest sales I have worked were about what the land carries rather than what grows on it.
Where the work has been
Since 2005 I have worked on 136 sales covering 57,761 acres, most of it in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan, and 34 of those were trust or estate land. The track record has every one of them, county by county.
The Schrader affiliation
I am a Vice President of Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, Inc. in Columbia City, Indiana, and the firm's lead broker in Michigan. Every sale I manage runs on the Schrader platform — its marketing reach, its multi-parcel auction method, and its back office. You get one person on the phone and the whole company behind the sale.
Credentials
- CAI — Certified Auctioneers Institute, the National Auction Association's professional designation.
- 11 state licenses — real estate in 7 states, auctioneer in 4. The full table, is on the licenses page.
- Education — B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University (1999); M.Ed., Ball State University (2005).
Away from the work
I have been married more than twenty-five years, and we have five kids. Most of what I do for a living is helping a family decide what happens to land their parents or grandparents farmed, and having a big family of my own is a fair part of why I take that seriously.
If you are weighing a sale, start with the questions every seller asks, the guidance for trustees, or where I've worked. Attorneys, trust officers, and farm managers have a page of their own.
Tell me about your land
Ten minutes is usually enough to talk through a realistic range, what a sale would look like, and whether an auction even fits — and if it doesn't, I'll say so.
Licensed Indiana real estate broker and auctioneer, Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, Inc.