How Much Do You Save When You Do It Yourself? (a Negative $492,600)
Unfortunately the people who need to make the most money from their forest are generally the first people to take a small shortcut that will damage their forest and their bank account.
Countless examples have proven to us and our clients that it pays many times over to hire a Forester to manage your timber sale.
It really does pay big money to hire a forester.
I recently had a man call me and ask for some advice in selling his timber.
A logger had approached him and offered him $5000 for a "selective thinning" of his forest, cutting everything with a 10 inch stump or larger, and he was concerned about how this would look.
And he should have been concerned, because what this logger was proposing was not a selective thinning, but rather a severe high-grade, and nearly a clearcut. This would have destroyed his forest, leaving only the very poorest quality stunted trees to regenerate his future forest.
I walked through the forest and quickly determined that we could get the landowner far more money and only remove the poorest quality trees, leaving the best quality trees to regenerate where these poor quality trees were removed.
We went on to remove 30 percent of the trees in his forest, taking care to maintain proper spacing and only remove poor quality trees along with trees that were at risk of dying in the next 10 years. This left him with a forest where you could hardly tell that anything had been removed.
This allowed the existing trees to have a bit more growing room and allowed a few areas where enough sunlight could reach the forest floor and allow for future trees to take root (these came from the seeds of the superior trees that we left standing).
And after doing the opposite of what this logger did, and leaving this landowner with a significantly improved forest rather than a high graded ruined patch of brush land. We gained this landowner $51000 for his timber, plus the added forest value, all at a cost of $3400 for our expenses.
When dealing with your valuable assets, don’t skimp on the professionals whether it be a Realtor, Architect, Attorney, or a Forester.
A good professional is always money well invested!
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