Buying cutover timberland and replanting, and the season it cost

A price of $1,150 an acre with county road frontage is a number that almost never shows up in public rural listings. Was it listed publicly or did the forester bring it to you? The answer is probably the second one, and that's the actual lesson.

So the whole return is 20 plus years out, with a thinning somewhere in the middle. How do you weigh that against simply buying a rental? It is a fair question for anyone planning a first purchase, because this runs opposite to nearly all the standard advice they hear.

The seedling ordering thing is such a specific piece of knowledge. What else is on that list of "things everyone in timber assumes you know"?

@paulgrant17 burn permits and burn windows. You can budget the chop and the burn and then get three years of drought where the county won't issue anything, and your site prep plan changes to chemical only, which costs more.

@angela_burke your forester earned his fee telling you to skip a season rather than plant bad stock. Poor genetics show up as crooked stems at year 15 and you can't fix it then. The lost year is cheap by comparison.

605 trees per acre is on the lower side of what I've been reading, some plans run 700 plus. Is that a deliberate choice about thinning later, or just what the planting crew does around you?

@tashaford30 what the money is for settles this long before either/or does. Cobalt's 90 acres will produce nothing for a decade and will also never call him about a water heater. The trees add volume every year whether or not anyone wants to buy lumber that quarter, and he chooses when to sell into that. A rental gives you cash now and a tenant. @angela_burke the thing to nail down early is access and the boundary. Was there a survey, or is the deed description and old blazes doing that work? Timber trespass across an unmarked line is the single most common way small tracts turn into lawsuits, and how it gets resolved depends on the state.

The hunting lease covering taxes keeps showing up in these threads. Is that a dependable market everywhere, or mostly a southeast pattern?

@mikeoconnell7 it's regional. Where I bought, recreational demand is a real part of why bare land prices have held up, and the lease income is small but it's the difference between a tract that costs you money every year and one that doesn't.

@angela_burke did you write a written management plan? Ours was required for the tax classification and it also turned out to be the document the bank actually read.

Reading this as somebody with no land at all, the interesting part is how many different paid specialists are in it. Forester, planting crew, spray contractor, nursery. Is there a shortage of people doing that work?

@nataliehsu Yes, in a lot of rural counties. The planting crews are seasonal and booked, and the consulting foresters in most timber counties are mostly over 55. If you want a service angle on land, that is where it is. Cobalt, one question. The $23k of establishment cost, is that being carried as basis or expensed? That is an accountant question, and the answer changes the after tax picture more than the $3,000 lost on brush.