Bid intensity: what bidder counts tell you

Bid intensity is how hard buyers fought for a tract, and it comes from two numbers read together: the bidder count and the premium the winning bid ran over the appraised minimum. One without the other can fool you. A high price means little if the minimum was high to begin with, and a crowd of bidders means little if they all quit at the floor. Put the two side by side and you have the clearest read on demand a public sale gives off.

Premium over minimum

The premium is the winning bid over the minimum, minus one, as a percent. A forty percent premium means the tract sold for one-point-four times its appraised floor. Because the minimum is the agency's own appraisal of what the timber can bear, the premium is really the gap between what one desk calculated and what a room full of buyers would actually pay. When premiums across a region run wide, mills are hungry for logs. When they collapse toward zero, the appraisal and the market have met, and there is no competition left in the room.

Bidder count

The bidder count is the plainer signal and the harder one to get, because not every agency reports it cleanly. Two bidders is a market. Five or six is a real fight, usually for a clean tract of good species with a short haul to several mills. One bidder means the tract went for close to its minimum to the only buyer who wanted it, and the premium on those sales is usually thin. Read a rising bidder count as mills competing for scarce logs and a falling one as supply loosening or a tract only one mill can use.

The no-bid sale

A sale that draws no qualifying bid is not a blank, it is a result. A no-bid says demand was too soft, the tract too hard, or the minimum set above what any buyer would pay that day. This site records it as a no-bid and never as a zero price, because a zero would poison every average it touched. A run of no-bid sales in one region says something a run of low prices does not: not that timber got cheap, but that at the asking floor it did not sell at all.

Watch the trend

The chart above is the median premium over minimum across green sawtimber sales, month by month, the competitive-heat line no single agency publishes. It is a median on purpose. Salvage, deck and product sales carry token minimums where any real bid reads as a premium of hundreds or thousands of percent, so those are ranked in their own class and kept out of this line. When it climbs, buyers are paying up over appraisal. When it sinks toward zero, competition is draining out of the market. The site measures the heat and reports it. It never tells a reader what to bid into it. For the money the premium sits on top of, see what is stumpage.