A new breed of water speculator is transforming the American West
Vidler Water Company, a tiny outfit…in Carson City…is an unusual company. It doesn’t actually deliver water to people, nor does it own any facilities for water treatment or desalination. Instead, the company functions as a broker for water rights, finding untapped water in rural communities and marketing it to developers and corporations in fast-growing cities and suburbs. For 20 years, the company has bought up remote farmland and drilled wells in bone-dry valleys to amass an enormous private water portfolio, then made tens of millions of dollars by selling that portfolio one piece at a time…The company was the first in the West to make a business model out of finding and flipping water.