A Free Appraisal From the Timber Buyer Isn't an Appraisal

A buyer calls, or a card turns up in the mailbox, and the offer sounds like a favor: someone will come out, walk your woods, and tell you what your timber is worth, free of charge. Plenty of Michigan landowners take that call every year, and there is nothing wrong with listening. The trouble rides in on the word appraisal, which gets stretched to cover what is really a purchase offer.

When the person estimating your timber's value is the same person hoping to buy it, the number they hand you is the first move in a negotiation. That does not make them dishonest. A timber buyer stays in business by paying less for wood than the mill will pay for it, the same way a car dealer lives on the spread between wholesale and retail. Their estimate reflects their side of the table. The question worth sitting with is who is reading yours.

What a buyer's free appraisal leaves out

Here is how the visit usually goes. Someone spends an hour or two on your property, looks over the timber, and follows up with a single number: a lump sum for the standing trees, or a rate per thousand board feet on a handful of species. The walk is real and the number is sincere. What comes with it is thin.

You rarely see the cruise behind the figure. A genuine inventory samples the stand in a disciplined way, plot by plot or tree by tree, recording what is there by species, by diameter, and by quality. Without that record, the number arrives with no math attached. You cannot see which trees were counted, how they were graded, or what turned standing wood into dollars. There is nothing to check, because nothing was shown.

You also see only one number, formed on a day when no one else is bidding. Timber, like most things, is worth what a willing market will pay, and a single private offer never tests the market. It tells you what one buyer will give when no one is competing for the sale.

And the person who set that number is the person who profits if it holds. I want to be fair to timber buyers, because many of them are straightforward people who make honest offers and run clean jobs. The problem is built into the arrangement rather than into anyone's character: the party measuring your timber is the party who gains from a low measurement, and you have no independent read to weigh against theirs.

Independence is the thing you are buying

An appraisal earns the name when it comes from someone with no stake in the sale. That is the whole value of it. When I inventory a stand, I am paid by the landowner and by no one else. I do not buy timber, I do not run a mill, and I take no commission from whoever eventually does. Whatever your woods turn out to be worth, my read on them does not change what lands in my pocket, which is exactly why the read is worth having.

Michigan State University Extension draws the same line in its guidance on hiring a consulting forester (bulletin E3188): a consultant is an independent professional, not employed by a sawmill, a logging contractor, or any wood-industry buyer, working for the landowner on a fee basis. That separation is the ground the whole appraisal stands on.

It shows up in what landowners collect, too. Drawing on work by Cubbage and colleagues (1996), NC State Extension reports that owners who brought in professional forestry help before selling averaged about 23 percent more income per acre and roughly 64 percent more per board foot than owners who sold on their own. A later study by Clark (2018) found sales that used a consulting forester brought in about 11 percent higher prices than sales without one. NC State's own guide records a plain case: a couple was offered $20,000 for the mature pine on their twenty acres, and the same timber, put out to sealed competitive bid, sold for $39,895. Averages are averages and one sale is one sale, so none of these promises a figure for your particular woods. The pattern behind them holds steady, though. A second set of eyes, with nothing to gain from a low number, tends to find value the first offer left standing.

The furthest apart I have watched the two numbers land came on a black walnut sale. The landowner had gathered several offers, and not one of them cleared six thousand dollars. These were high quality walnut trees, worth a good deal more than that, and I told him the offers were low for what was standing on his ground. He had me administer the sale instead, and it brought close to thirty thousand dollars. Walnut is a high-value species and those early numbers were unusually low, so that spread is wider than most. The direction of it is the ordinary case, though. The first figure a buyer puts in front of you and the figure a well-run, competitive sale produces are seldom the same, and the gap tends to fall on the landowner's side once someone is measuring from that side of the table.

What an independent appraisal actually involves

An independent appraisal is a different piece of work from a buyer's walk-through, built to give you a number you can defend and a document you keep.

It starts with a real inventory. I sample the stand systematically instead of walking it for the best individual trees, using fixed plots or a full tally depending on the size and shape of the property. Every measured tree goes down by species and diameter, then gets graded for form and defect, because a veneer log, a sawlog, and a pallet log off the same species are three different assets wearing one name.

From there the value comes together with the context that actually moves it: the haul distance to mills that want your species, the road and skid access, the lay of the ground, how the soil holds up under equipment, and what the market is paying right now for the products your stand can produce. The result comes back to you in writing, showing what was measured, how, and what it means for a decision.

What that written result contains depends on the question you bring me. If a buyer has already marked trees and made an offer, and you want to know whether the offer is fair, I appraise those marked trees and give you a full breakdown by species, by volume, and by count, with dollar estimates for the total value of what the buyer wants to take. You can hold it straight up against the offer.

If the question is broader, what do I have and what should I do with it, that calls for a full timber cruise and a stand-level report. It covers the species present across every size class, so you learn what the merchantable timber is worth and how much of it is there, and also what is coming up underneath: the younger trees that will be merchantable in the decades ahead. A report like that does double duty. It prices what you could sell now, and it shows you what the stand is growing into, which is the information a real management decision runs on.

That written record earns its keep even if you set it on a shelf. A buyer's number evaporates the moment the truck pulls out of the driveway. A written appraisal is still there next winter, still there when the market turns, and still there when your children are the ones deciding what to do with the woods.

Price gets discovered at the bid, not the appraisal

An appraisal tells you roughly what is standing and what it ought to bring. What a buyer will actually pay this season is a separate question, and only a competitive sale answers it. When several qualified buyers study the same clearly defined offering and put in sealed bids, the market sets the price instead of a lone visitor.

This is why an appraisal is usually a step toward a sale rather than the end of one. Once the timber is measured and the sale is designed, marking the trees and inviting bids lets buyers compete for the work. The buyer who offered you a free appraisal is welcome to bid too, and many do. A fair contest tends to serve everyone in it, including the buyer who wins by outbidding the others rather than by being the only one in the room.

When a free look is genuinely useful

A buyer's walk-through has an honest use. It can tell you quickly and cheaply whether a sale is worth pursuing at all. If your timber is scattered and low in value, a buyer's rough number can spare you the cost of a full appraisal you did not need, and that is a fair trade.

The line to watch is the one where a free number becomes the number you sign against. Once a buyer's estimate is the only figure in front of you at the contract, you have handed the one interested party in the deal the job of setting its terms. An independent read before you decide keeps that from happening, and it costs you a conversation.

Now what

If a buyer's number is sitting in front of you and you are wondering whether it is fair, the useful next step is a second, disinterested measurement of the same trees, from someone who gains nothing from the answer.