A large proportion of Oregon’s land is forested. Based on a 2024 Oregon Department of Forestry estimate, forestland covers 10.4-11.3 million acres (about 39%) of the state’s non-federal land. Oregon’s forest products sector is nationally significant, as we consistently lead the United States in softwood and plywood production. In 2021, the forestry sector accounted for about 3% of all jobs in the state, employing roughly 62,000 people.
This post gives an overview of recent trends in the market for western Oregon’s privately-owned timberland. I specify “privately-owned” because an important piece of the forestry sector’s modern history concerns the role of timber harvests on federal land. Until the late 1980s, private and federal forestland (mostly National Forests managed by the US Forest Service (USFS)) each supplied 40-60% of the timber harvested in Oregon. Between 1989 and 1995, following the listing of the northern spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act and other policy changes, timber harvests on federal lands fell by roughly 90%. Although total harvests remain about 50% lower than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, private lands have supplied about 75-80% of harvested volume in recent decades.
The timberland price data I’m using cover 3,789 transactions in western Oregon over the period 1999-2024. (See the end of the post for details on how I constructed the sample.) To define western Oregon, I use the US Forest Service’s Resource Area regions and focus on land in the Northwest and Southwest regions, which includes all counties west of the crest of the Cascades. The northern boundary of Lane County divides the Northwest and Southwest regions. Western Oregon is responsible for the vast majority of logging and standing timber volume in the state. Eastern Oregon, containing the USFS-defined Central and Blue Mountain regions, is omitted because its forestry sector is particularly dependent on federal timber harvests. As a result, its private timberland market is relatively inactive, with only 378 sales occurring since 1999.
Figure 1 plots the acreage-weighted average price of timberland in western Oregon between 2000 and 2024, with the centered 3-year average (which includes 1999 prices in the value for 2000) shown in gray to smooth out some of the year-to-year movement. The average price of timberland increased by about 50% from 2000 to 2007 but gave back most of the gain over the next five years during the Great Recession and its aftermath, with the market bottoming out in 2012. The reason is straightforward. US timberland is a primary source of the raw timber used in domestic residential construction. When the housing market crashed, so did the demand for lumber and the land from which it is sourced. Everything else being equal, this demand contraction reduced timberland prices. Note that this contrasts with what happened to agricultural land markets during the 2007-2009 recession, when farmland prices remained fairly stable.
Between 2012 and 2017, timberland prices regained all of the lost value, increasing to around $12-13,000 per acre, and holding at around that level today. Over the past couple years, Oregon’s private timberland market has become more erratic. To understand why, consider what’s occurred with lumber prices, or the price of processed timber used in things like housing construction. Lumber prices in the Pacific Northwest generally correlate reasonably well with log prices (or pond prices, the price of logs delivered to a mill) and stumpage prices (the price that would be paid to the landowner for the standing timber on their land). Stumpage prices are most relevant for understanding movement in timberland prices, but stumpage price data, particularly for private timberland, are not easily accessible.
After peaking in 2017-18, Pacific Northwest log and lumber prices declined and remained low through the start of the pandemic. The decline in lumber prices has been attributed to perceptions that the pandemic would bring about a prolonged weakening of lumber demand from the construction industry. However, the demand for new housing, as well as remodels of existing homes, remained strong, leading to a lumber shortage. The shortage was created by several factors, including supply-chain bottlenecks and mill capacity constraints, culminating with a spike in softwood lumber prices in 2021. Similar increases in log prices have been reported by OSU Extension’s Lauren Grand in Lane County and for Douglas-fir stumpage prices from National Forests in the PNW. Lumber, log, and stumpage prices eventually came down as housing starts slowed, coinciding with the dip in timberland prices between 2021 and 2023, but have since increased and remained relatively stable.
I’m not showing the regional breakdown but note that both the Northwest and Southwest have followed similar trends over time, with timberland in the Northwest being worth about $4,000 more per acre on average since 1999. Over the past five years, the gap has widened, with average per-acre timberland prices of $15,586 in the Northwest and $10,573 in the Southwest.
Looking ahead forward, several key factors could shape Oregon’s timberland market. For one, President Trump issued an executive order in March that outlined a strategy to boost federal logging by 25%. The intent of the executive order goes hand in hand with another ongoing issue affecting the sector – trade with Canada, which supplies about 30% of the softwood lumber used in the US. Since August, Canadian lumber has been subject to a 14.5% tariff, a rate that was originally set to rise to 39.5% under Trump’s tariff plan. Although the tariff increase was scrapped amid industry push-back, ongoing federal investigations could result in increased tariffs in the near-term. On balance, greater tariffs would work against the softening of lumber prices that would result from a federal supply increase. These changes could lead to a more erratic land market, as we’ve seen in the past few years, but with minimal effect on long-term land price trends. In Oregon, Governor Kotek specifically mentioned the importance of lumber imports in light of her ambitious aims to address our housing shortage, so the way this all plays out could have rippling effects that are felt throughout the broader state economy.
Finally, wildfires have and will continue to pose a large risk to the forestry sector, not to mention the people and communities they affect. A recent analysis indicates that the combined effect of the post-2000 increase in the occurrence of large wildfires and climate change (namely increased drought) have already reduced timberland prices by 10% relative to what they would have been had pre-2000 wildfire and climate conditions remained.
Note: Timberland price data come from a database of property transactions I developed using CoreLogic’s proprietary nationwide property transactions database. The 1999-2024 timberland property sales used in this analysis are: (1) exclusively made up of forested parcels (per CoreLogic’s land use codes), (2) at least 10 acres in size and made up of fewer than 10 individual parcels, (3) priced between $100 and $60,000/acre, (4) at least 2 miles outside urban growth boundaries, (5) have a majority of land classified as privately owned based on a recent Oregon Department of Forestry GIS shapefile, and (6) have a majority of the sold area in forest cover at least once between 1985 and 2023 per the Annual National Land Cover Database. All prices are adjusted for inflation to the year 2024 using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Gross Domestic Product Implicit Price Deflator.