When rural acreage prices off hunting demand instead of the timber math

Looked at a 140 acre cutover parcel last month where the timber cruise supported maybe half the asking price. The listing didn't hide it either. Frontage on a county road, a creek, established food plots, and the broker said flatly that his buyers are people who want a place to hunt and camp, and they don't run a stumpage spreadsheet.

That's consistent with what surveys keep showing, timberland values holding flat to up a few percent on recreational and diversified demand rather than wood prices. So the question isn't whether recreational value exists. It's whether you should pay for it.

One argument says yes, that's the market. The buyer pool for small tracts is dominated by recreational buyers, so recreational attributes are what your exit depends on, and pricing off timber value alone means you never buy anything.

The other says recreational premium is sentiment you can't underwrite. It doesn't produce cash unless you lease it, it can compress when rural discretionary money dries up, and paying for it means the biological growth is subsidizing a price you overpaid on. Timber value at least has a mill behind it.

I'm a couple of parcels into this and I've paid the premium once and refused it once. Still not sure which was the mistake.