How public timber auctions work

A public timber auction runs in the same order every time: cruise and appraise the tract, advertise it, take the bids, award the sale. What changes from agency to agency is the paperwork, the bidding format and the unit the timber is scaled in. Learn the sequence once and every Washington DNR, Forest Service and BLM sale on this site reads the same way.

The sequence

First the agency cruises the tract, a field survey that estimates the volume by species and grade. The cruise sets the offered volume and feeds an appraisal, and the appraisal becomes the minimum bid, the floor below which the agency will not sell. Then the sale is advertised, publicly noticed with a packet or prospectus and a map. Bidders are told to examine the timber themselves, because the cruise is an estimate and the risk of the logs passes to the buyer at award. On sale day the bids come in, sealed or called out in an oral auction, and the tract goes to the high bidder above the minimum. If no bid meets the minimum, the sale is a no-bid, a real result the board records.

Three sellers, three ways

The Forest Service sells national-forest timber and scales it in CCF, hundred cubic feet. For an oral auction it takes written sealed qualifying bids first, and only bidders whose sealed bid meets the appraised value join the oral bidding, the rule set in the national-forest timber statute. Its appraisals lean on recent sale prices plus an engineering estimate of logging and haul cost, the transaction-evidence method it uses across the western regions. Washington DNR sells state trust-land timber in MBF to raise money for schools, universities and counties, generally runs its auctions on the last Tuesday through Thursday of the month, though the dates move (the Washington DNR path is walked through in how Washington DNR timber sale auctions work), and takes a bid deposit and a bond from the winner. BLM sells O&C timber in western Oregon, also in MBF, under a 1937 sustained-yield law that sends half the receipts to eighteen counties.

Advertised versus sold

Keep the two states of a sale apart. An advertised sale has been noticed and scheduled but not yet auctioned, it carries an appraised minimum and sits on the calendar. A sold sale has been auctioned and awarded. This site holds them in different places on purpose: the calendar is the forward book, the board and the sale pages are results. One coverage caveat, the BLM notices we currently ingest carry advertised sales rather than per-sale winning bids, so BLM shows up on the calendar and not on the results board for now. BLM does publish bureau-wide fiscal-year and monthly revenue and volume totals plus quarterly contract data, but not the per-sale winning bids, purchasers or no-bid outcomes we would need for results rows, so BLM stays a calendar source here.

Where to watch it

The calendar above is the advertised book, the sales noticed but not yet sold, soonest first.

The board is the other half, what has already sold and how hard it was bid. For exactly how each sale is read out of the agencies' documents and checked before it is published, see the methodology page. The site reports the process and the results, never what to bid. The appraisal that sets the minimum before any of this happens is its own subject, covered in how stumpage is appraised, which walks the ODF, WA DNR, Montana DNRC and Forest Service methods separately because they do not agree.