In 2022, one year after the Dixie Fire raced through the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, a family-owned timber company closed the purchase of 58,000 acres of forestland from a timberland manager that had held the property for most of the previous century. The tracts spread across Lassen, Plumas, Modoc, Shasta, and Sierra counties, near […]
Building and buying property in remote Texas towns has become more practical as building material supply networks extend deeper into the state. Consolidation among lumber and building material distributors is part of that story: fewer, larger networks now serve markets that once depended on a single local yard. Understanding how these supply chains work helps
Timberland deals move in large round numbers, but the logic scales down to a 40-acre tract. When a major operator agrees to pay about $149 million for 69,200 acres of Alabama timberland, the math works out to roughly $2,150 per acre, and the same variables, timber inventory, plantation age, soil quality, and access, decide what
A company that owns its distribution warehouses faces a familiar trade-off: the buildings sit on the balance sheet as illiquid assets, while the cash needed for debt repayment, fleet upgrades, and expansion stays locked inside the real estate. One route out of that position is a sale-leaseback, a transaction in which an owner sells a
A six-yard lumber company in Vermont recently agreed to buy a four-yard competitor whose branches date back to 1888, a deal that says as much about the region’s housing stock as it does about the lumber business. Rural New England is full of homes built before 1950, and the yards that serve them have been
For most businesses and households, real estate is the largest asset on the books, and it is often the least actively managed one. A distributor that owns a warehouse in a city it no longer serves is holding capital in the wrong shape: the building produces no revenue, the debt attached to it still has
A hardware dealer that served the same Seattle neighborhood for 86 years is closing because the city changed around it. Upzoning raised the value of the land under the store, property taxes followed the new assessment, and the family that owned the business sold its properties for $17.2 million to the developer of an 18-story
Family-owned building supply dealers anchor construction in markets the national chains skip. The Outer Banks of North Carolina is that kind of market: a string of coastal towns where storms, salt air, and long supply lines make the local dealer as important as the local bank. A dealer that has served the region since the
When a family-owned lumberyard that operated on the same site for more than a century changes hands, the transaction says a lot about how building supply properties are valued. Hinckley’s Lumber in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts sold for $2.3 million, a deal that included 1.6 acres and four buildings: a two-story, 11,401-square-foot office, retail and warehouse
A timberland joint venture pools two things that rarely sit in the same hands: large blocks of forest land and the capital to hold them for decades. One partner operates the land while institutional investors contribute most of the money. When the arrangement stops making sense for one side, the exit can be as complicated
