The Magazine of the American Landowner is an essential guide for investors, landowners, and those interested in buying or selling land. The award-winning quarterly is known for its annual survey of America's largest landowners, The Land Report 100.
Issue link: https://landreport.epubxp.com/i/738657
FA L L 2 0 1 6 | The LandReport 69 LANDREPORT.COM F ew Americans realize that our country's most valuable cash crop isn't corn or beans or even marijuana. It's timber. Makes sense, doesn't it? Consider the value of a felled tree. Now factor in hundreds of millions of acres of forestland in the United States. But such a large scale also implies very typical returns. A good rule of thumb is a 6 to 8 percent annual return based on two factors: the biologic growth of the timber and the appreciation of the land. Yet since 2005, American Timberlands has bested industry benchmarks by a whopping 700 basis points annually. Their secret sauce? American Timberlands looks beyond typical timber investments — biologic growth plus land appreciation — to incorporate a third factor: sophisticated land management. "We're investing in land that has options for management opportunities that will provide other returns," says American Timberlands CEO Thomas Rowland. "Timber is the basic attribute. But we're looking for land that has other attributes that we can manage simultaneously to timber. We're looking for environmental mitigation, mining, commercial opportunities, conserva- tion, and in a few cases, low-density real estate development," Rowland says. Wetland mitigation banking has proven to be one area that accelerates returns while aligning with the company's skill sets as well as its mission to be land stewards. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHUTTERSTOCK THIS PAGE: Each year, timber companies plant hundreds of millions of seedlings nationwide. OPPOSITE: Few realize that timber ranks as the number one cash crop in the United States.