Pennsylvania DCNR timber sales: bid results and prices

How DCNR sells state forest timber

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) sells standing timber from the state forests through its Bureau of Forestry, which offers more than 70 million board feet a year across more than 180 sales. Each sale is a sealed-bid, lump-sum sale of the marked sawtimber and pulpwood on one tract. Bids go in electronically through Bid Express and are opened at a scheduled public bid opening. DCNR will not consider a bid below the sale's minimum, which the prospectus calls the department's "estimated minimum valuation for the timber" after it deducts its own estimate of haul-road construction and seeding costs.

The cruise is a tree estimate, not a scale. Sawtimber volumes come from the Girard form class volume tables on the International 1/4-inch log rule, pulpwood is measured in HCF (a hundred cubic feet of solid wood), and the prospectus says no logs will be scaled and no volume adjustments made. A buyer posts a bid deposit with the bid, set by the sale's value from a published table ($10,000 for a sale valued between $100,001 and $500,000), and the winner then posts a performance deposit of 10 to 25 percent of the bid plus DCNR's road estimate, falling as the bid rises. The stumpage on each cutting block is paid in full before logging starts on that block. If the high bidder fails to sign, DCNR may offer the timber to the other qualified bidders in order of their bids, which is why the second bid is shown beside each result.

How to read these numbers

"Bid per MBF" is the lump-sum high bid divided by DCNR's sawtimber volume. The bid also buys the pulpwood on the sale, so the price figures on this page (the headline, the month and forest columns and the chart) count only sawtimber sales, where pulpwood is under 10 percent of DCNR's appraised value. 40 of the 47 sold sales qualify; on them pulpwood was a median under 1 percent of the appraised value. 6 sales with more pulpwood than that are left out of the price figures. One sale whose statistics sheet could not be read is left out too, since its pulpwood share is unknown. Every sold sale counts in the premium and bid-count figures.

The minimum and DCNR's appraisal are linked: each sold sale's statistics sheet lists DCNR's appraised value of the timber by species, and the minimum bid is that valuation less DCNR's estimate of haul-road costs, the deduction the prospectus states. The species table adds those appraisals up. It is DCNR's valuation of the timber, not a winning price per species, because a lump-sum bid is never split by species. A sale that drew no bid goes on DCNR's no-bid list, where it is available for bidding; DCNR notes that a no-bid sale's prospectus may be out of date and to ask the forest district.

Why Pennsylvania has its own page

Oregon and Washington timber, the bulk of the board-foot sales on Stumpage, is measured on the Scribner rule, which the Oregon Department of Forestry calls the main rule used in Oregon and Washington by private industry and state agencies. The two rules give different board-foot counts for the same log, so a Pennsylvania price per MBF is not on the same footing as an Oregon or Washington one. This page is therefore kept apart: Pennsylvania sales are not on the public timber board, the auction calendar, the county table or the statistics, and no figure here is averaged with a western sale. For what a board foot is and how log rules differ, see what is an MBF?. DCNR's list of recently opened sales is a rolling one, so older results drop off its page; Stumpage reads the three DCNR lists every day and keeps each result from the day it first appears. Source: Pennsylvania DCNR, Bureau of Forestry (bid openings, no-bid sales and awarded sales).