Four-year-old Jonathan Killmer dips his toes into a creek and watches, enthralled, while his dad unloads sacks of deer feed from a pickup. As he works, Bill Killmer explains to a visitor why he bought hundreds of acres of rolling pine and hardwood forest in northeastern Georgia. Killmer, 50, grew up in Ohio, the descendant of farmers. He says he's "sort of retired" after selling a travel business and a building-maintenance company in Atlanta. He doesn't intend to plant corn or soybeans on his spread, which he calls Rosser Creek Farm -- the upcountry red clay wouldn't be suitable. His agenda: Hold the land as an investment for at least five years and "have a lot of fun while we own it." Then he may sell the farm in pieces, subdivide some land at the edges for estate-home sites -- or perhaps do nothing at all.

Killmer has counterparts all across the country, mostly in Texas, the South and the western mountain states. Investors are paying anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 an acre for land that doubles as a private recreational escape and a diversifier for a long-term portfolio. Killmer hunts some, but as the parent of Jonathan and three teenagers, he sees the farm as a family retreat -- a place to spend lazy days angling for bass, catfish and brim in the property's ponds, as well as camping, hiking, swimming, spotting turkeys and other wildlife, and just hanging out.

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About 75 miles east of Atlanta's beltway, Killmer's acreage isn't exactly in the wilderness. But it wasn't easy to acquire because it wasn't on any multiple listing service. Kevin Teston, a land broker in Augusta, Ga., worked with Killmer for a year to find the tract.

Teston believes that the land, formerly the property of a big timber company, has doubled in value since Killmer bought it two and a half years ago. Some of that appreciation is a result of its location. Atlanta is close enough that nearby crossroads towns, such as Madison and Greensboro, are sprouting coffee shops and nice restaurants. But similar vacant land twice as far from Atlanta is also heating up.

Just as other real estate investments have started losing their appeal, a growing inventory of recreational land is attracting more buyers. Major landowners, such as International Paper, Mead Westvaco and Weyerhaeuser, are divesting their forest holdings, usually to banks and insurance companies. Hardscrabble farming no longer provides a living, so kids raised on former crop land have long since marched off to Atlanta or Nashville or New York City. Old home places end up in the hands of banks and other groups of investors, who carve the property into tracts of 200 to 1,500 acres and sell it to small-scale developers and hunting clubs -- and people like Bill Killmer.

Is this a backwoods version of the investor-owned real estate glut that sank the condominium markets in Florida and Las Vegas? Possibly. Chris Hawley, chief executive officer of Mossy Oak Properties, a network of recreational-land brokers in nine states, says a recreational expanse "is just a different kind of condominium. It's just not at the beach and there are trees growing on it." But for now, Hawley, who lives and works in rural Livingston, Ala., is a very busy man.

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