Timber Tract Operations (U.S.) — NAICS 113110

1. Overview

Timber tract operations is the business of owning forestland and growing standing trees to sell as timber. An operator in this industry does not run the sawmill or, strictly speaking, even do the cutting — it owns the land and the trees, manages the forest so the timber grows and gains value, and sells the standing wood ("stumpage") to loggers and mills [1]. The core asset is biological: trees add volume every year and "grow into" more valuable product classes over decades, so the crop appreciates whether or not the owner sells in any given year [19].

The reason this is worth understanding is that timberland is a real asset that behaves unlike most financial holdings. Its returns come partly from timber prices and partly from the trees simply getting bigger, giving the asset a built-in growth engine and a long record as an inflation hedge with low correlation to stocks and bonds [18][19]. It is also a play on U.S. housing — most sawn lumber ends up in homes — plus newer income streams like carbon credits, hunting leases, minerals, and selling well-located parcels for development.

There are two broad ways to gain exposure. Public-market investors can buy shares of a timber real estate investment trust (REIT — a company that owns income-producing real estate and pays out most of its earnings to shareholders), which trade like any stock but also usually own mills and other businesses, so they are not pure plays. Private investors and institutions own forestland directly or through a TIMO (Timberland Investment Management Organization — a firm that buys and manages forests on behalf of pension funds, endowments, insurers, and wealthy families) [11]. Direct ownership gives purer asset exposure but is illiquid and operationally intensive.

2. What it is and how it is structured

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 113110 covers establishments "primarily engaged in the operation of timber tracts for the purpose of selling standing timber" [1]. The defining activity is growing and selling the standing crop — not harvesting it and not milling it. A typical owner manages inventory, roads, planting, thinning, fire and pest risk, harvest scheduling, and timber sales; logging contractors may do the actual cutting and hauling.

What the code excludes (and the adjacent codes):

• Logging — cutting standing timber into logs — is NAICS 113310 [1].
• Short-rotation woody crops with a growing-and-harvesting cycle of 10 years or less (fast-cycle tree farms) fall under Nursery and Tree Production, NAICS 111421 [1].
• Forest nurseries and gathering of forest products (seeds, bark, moss) are NAICS 113210 [1].
• Support activities for forestry (reforestation, timber cruising, forestry consulting, firefighting done for others, pest control) are NAICS 115310 [2].
• Simply leasing land that happens to have trees as a real-estate rental is NAICS 531190, Lessors of Other Real Estate Property [1].

Timberland ownership is far broader than the NAICS code, because a forest can be owned by a family, a company, a pension-fund vehicle, a REIT, a manufacturer, or a government agency while the forestry work is done by an affiliate or outside manager. Ownership is also unusually lopsided. The U.S. Forest Service's national ownership dashboard estimates U.S. forestland is owned roughly as follows: families and individuals about 37%, the federal government about 29%, corporations about 22%, state governments about 7%, and local governments and Tribal groups about 2% each [3]. Of roughly 765 million acres of U.S. forestland, private owners hold about 445 million acres (about 147 million corporate, 298 million non-corporate), the federal government about 238 million (of which the U.S. Forest Service manages about 145 million), and state/county/local governments about 83 million [4]. An estimated 3.7 million families own tracts of 10+ acres, together holding roughly a third of all U.S. forest — much of it managed for a mix of timber, recreation, privacy, conservation, or eventual land sale rather than regular commercial harvest [3][4].

3. How big it is

By the federal business statistics for NAICS 113110, this is a tiny industry on paper. The figures below come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 County Business Patterns (CBP), which counts employer establishments and their payroll — not the value of timberland or total industry revenue.

The payroll figures are reported in thousands of dollars in the source data and converted to millions here. Our ground-truth extract does not provide industry revenue, operating profit, timberland acreage, harvest volume, inventory value, or market capitalization for the code, and those figures should not be inferred from payroll. The $19 million SBA (Small Business Administration) number is a size-classification threshold, not an estimate of industry size [6].

The undercount is the real story. These figures capture only employer businesses whose primary classification is "timber tract operations," and that misses almost all of the economic footprint for three reasons. First, most forestland sits with 3.7 million families and with federal and state governments, none of which are counted as timber-tract employers, and CBP excludes self-employed people, most government employees, and agricultural production workers [3][5]. Second, the largest commercial owners are timber REITs and TIMO-managed institutional accounts, whose people and revenue are generally reported under their real-estate, financial, or forest-products parent classifications rather than 113110. Third, growing timber is a low-labor, land-holding activity, so even large owners carry few payroll employees per acre. The result: fewer than 4,000 counted employees sit atop an asset class spanning tens of millions of investable acres and tens of billions of dollars of institutional capital [11]. Read the CBP numbers as the payroll of small independent operators, not the size of the timberland economy.

4. The investable universe

Public companies. The pure-play public universe is small and has been consolidating toward two large U.S. names, with one small cross-border option.

That is essentially the listed field. PotlatchDeltic (formerly NASDAQ: PCH) ceased to exist as a standalone company in the January 2026 merger; the resulting Rayonier combines timberlands, wood products, and real estate rather than only standing-timber operations [8]. Earlier public names were absorbed the same way (Plum Creek into Weyerhaeuser in 2016; CatchMark into PotlatchDeltic in 2022) [28]. Diversified forest-products firms such as International Paper own or control timberland, but their listings are classified as manufacturers, not timber-tract operators.

Major private and institutional owners/managers. The big money is private. TIMOs and REITs together own or manage roughly 40 million U.S. acres [11]. Large private strategic owners include Sierra Pacific Industries (a family-owned forest-products company managing more than 2.4 million acres in California, Oregon, and Washington) [13]; Irving Woodlands, part of J.D. Irving, with roughly 1.25 million acres in Maine [14]; Seven Islands Land Company, which manages the Pingree family timberlands in Maine [15]; and Green Diamond Resource Company with its related Twin Creeks platform, managing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest [16]. Among the largest institutional timberland managers in North America (2025): American Forest Management (~5.7 million acres managed), Manulife Investment Management / Hancock Natural Resource Group (~3.6 million), LandVest (~2.4 million), F&W Forestry Services (~2.3 million), Wagner Forest Management (~2.1 million), Resource Management Service (~2.1 million), Forest Investment Associates (~1.8 million), and Molpus Woodlands Group (~1.7 million) [11]. BTG Pactual's Timberland Investment Group and J.P. Morgan Asset Management's Campbell Global are other major managers of institutional capital [11][17]. These managers often run assets for pension funds, endowments, insurers, and family offices, so the manager is frequently not the ultimate owner. Governments (led by the U.S. Forest Service) and millions of family owners hold the majority of the acreage but are not investment vehicles [3][4].

5. How the money works

Timberland has two return engines, and the first is the unusual one.

Biological growth. Trees add roughly 5% to their volume per year on average, and as they age they cross thresholds from low-value pulpwood to mid-value "chip-n-saw" to high-value sawtimber — each step worth more per ton [19]. This biological growth is estimated to drive more than 60% of long-run timberland returns regardless of where prices sit in their cycle, and it creates optionality: when prices are weak, an owner can defer the harvest and "store timber on the stump," letting the crop keep growing until markets recover [19].

Timber sales (stumpage). Owners sell the standing trees to loggers and mills. Two common structures: a lump-sum sale (a fixed price for a marked stand, usually via competitive sealed bid, with price risk passing to the buyer) and a pay-as-cut sale (a fixed price per ton as wood is delivered to the mill) [20]. Southern pine rotations run roughly 20–35 years; Pacific Northwest Douglas-fir is grown longer.

Prices are commodity prices, and they cycle. In the U.S. South at the end of 2025, pine sawtimber stumpage averaged about $23 per ton — down roughly 6% year-over-year and about 10% below its early-2022 peak — while pine pulpwood had fallen to about $6 per ton, down roughly 22% year-over-year and about 46% below its 2022 peak; hardwood pulpwood held near $8 per ton [21]. Weak sawtimber tracks soft housing; collapsing pulpwood reflects a shrinking paper industry (see Section 6) [21].

Ancillary and "higher-and-better-use" income. Beyond cutting trees, owners earn from recreational (hunting) leases, mineral, energy, and solar leases, and increasingly carbon-offset credits — which for some projects can supply 20–30% of annual cash flow [22]. They also periodically sell parcels for development, recreation, or conservation ("higher and better use," or HBU, land sales) at values well above bare timber value, and monetize conservation easements [22].

The scorecard. The NCREIF (National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries) Timberland Index — the standard private-market benchmark since 1987 — has returned roughly 10.7% annualized over its history, with low volatility and a positive correlation to inflation [18]. In the public market, the REIT structure means little or no corporate income tax if the company distributes most of its income, so investors are paid largely through dividends; timber REITs must meet asset, income, ownership, and distribution tests, and often place mills and other non-qualifying activities in taxable subsidiaries [27][28].

6. What drives demand

• Housing and construction. More than 70% of U.S. softwood lumber and structural-panel consumption is tied to single-family homebuilding and remodeling [21]. Housing starts, repair-and-remodel spending, and — behind them — mortgage rates are the dominant swing factor for sawtimber demand and price. The Census Bureau reported privately owned housing starts at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about 1.427 million in June 2026, roughly 3.5% above a year earlier [23].
• Pulp and paper (structurally shrinking). Pulpwood feeds paper and packaging mills, but this demand is eroding, especially in the South: more than 10 major pulp facilities closed between 2023 and 2025, removing over 25 million tons of annual fiber demand through product shifts, recycled fiber, and mill closures [21]. Packaging (containerboard) is healthier than graphic paper, but the trend has hammered pulpwood prices.
• Emerging demand. Mass-timber construction (engineered wood for taller buildings), wood-pellet/biomass energy (largely an export story to Europe and Asia), and voluntary and compliance carbon markets are potential new demand legs [19][22][24].
• Land and development value. Population growth and development pressure lift the HBU value of well-located tracts [22].
• Interest rates cut both ways: they move housing demand, and they influence the discount and capitalization rates used to value timberland.

Because the same tract can serve several of these markets, demand is diversified but not uniform — a housing slowdown can cut sawlog prices while owners with mature inventories defer harvests rather than sell into a weak market [24].

7. Regulation

Growing timber on private land is comparatively lightly regulated at the federal level, but several regimes matter, and exposure is highly local:

• State forest-practices rules. Oregon, Washington, and especially California impose detailed harvest, replanting, road, burning, and stream-buffer requirements; most Southern states rely on voluntary Best Management Practices (BMPs) for water quality, though whether BMPs are voluntary or mandatory varies by jurisdiction [3].
• Water quality and wetlands. Roads, stream crossings, and erosion are governed under the federal Clean Water Act, including Section 404 rules covering dredged or fill material in waters and wetlands [25].
• Endangered Species Act (ESA). Federal law can restrict activities that harm listed species or their habitat; the spotted-owl listings of the 1990s sharply cut federal timber supply in the Pacific Northwest, a lasting influence on regional prices [26].
• Federal timber supply. The U.S. Forest Service sells timber from national forests, and policy swings in that program shift regional supply and prices [4].
• Taxation. Most states offer preferential "current-use" property-tax assessment for timberland; at the federal level, timber-sale income and the REIT structure carry specific tax treatment [27].
• Certification and carbon. Forest certification (SFI, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative; FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council) is market-driven rather than mandated, and carbon-credit revenue depends on registry standards and verification, an evolving area [22].

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining structural shift of the past 25 years was the separation of the trees from the mills. Integrated forest-products companies (International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, and Plum Creek's predecessors) divested millions of acres to tax-efficient REITs and to TIMOs managing institutional capital [11][28]. That created today's split market: a small number of large, professionalized owners at the top and millions of small family owners at the bottom.

At the top, consolidation has been relentless — Weyerhaeuser absorbed Plum Creek (2016), Potlatch merged with Deltic (2018) and then bought CatchMark (2022), and Rayonier merged with PotlatchDeltic (2026) [8][28]. The listed pure-play field has effectively narrowed to Weyerhaeuser and the merged Rayonier, which between them dominate the sector's market value [8][10]. Private managers, meanwhile, keep aggregating institutional capital and competing for the same high-quality properties, so consolidation is selective rather than complete [11][17].

Competition also happens at the tract level, not just the company level. The most valuable advantages are productive species and favorable age classes, proximity to sawmills, pulp mills, and ports, reliable road access, scale in inventory and timber marketing, geographic diversification, the ability to monetize recreation/minerals/energy/conservation uses, and low-cost, patient capital. Geography defines much of the contest: the U.S. South grows pine fast and cheaply and now carries a large standing inventory against weakening pulp demand, keeping stumpage soft; the Pacific Northwest grows higher-value species with more export exposure to Asia [11][21].

9. Risks

• Housing cyclicality and rates. Sawtimber demand and prices swing with homebuilding, which swings with mortgage rates [21][23].
• Southern oversupply and pulp-mill closures. A large standing inventory plus disappearing pulpwood buyers is pressuring Southern stumpage with no quick fix [21].
• Physical and climate hazards. Wildfire, hurricanes, insects, disease, and drought can destroy standing inventory or force low-value salvage sales; most growing timber is uninsured, so geographic diversification is the main hedge [18].
• Customer and mill concentration. A nearby mill closure can sharply reduce the value of timber that lacks economical market access.
• Illiquidity and duration (private route). Direct timberland is a long-hold, hard-to-sell asset, and appraisals can lag actual market conditions; the ability to defer harvest partly offsets this but does not eliminate it [20].
• Interest-rate and valuation risk. Higher discount rates reduce timberland values and make leveraged acquisitions less attractive.
• Commodity-price volatility and trade friction, including lumber and the long-running U.S.–Canada softwood lumber duties [21].
• Carbon-market and policy risk. Newer revenue from carbon credits depends on market credibility and shifting rules [22].
• Data risk. Public-company results blend timberlands with manufacturing and real estate, making pure-industry comparisons difficult.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public route. Buy shares of a timber REIT — Weyerhaeuser (WY) or the merged Rayonier (RYN), with Acadian Timber (ADN) as a small cross-border option — for liquid, small-minimum exposure to timberland plus, in each case, some wood-products manufacturing, paid out largely as dividends [7][8][12]. Broad forestry exchange-traded funds (ETFs) such as WOOD and CUT also exist, but they mostly hold forest-products manufacturers rather than pure timberland, so they are a diluted proxy for the asset. Judge a listed owner on asset quality rather than headline dividend yield: owned versus managed acres, productive acres and inventory age, sustainable harvest levels and realized prices, sawtimber-versus-pulpwood mix, land-sale and other-income dependence, debt per acre and interest coverage, net asset value (NAV) per share versus market price, and segment EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

Private route. Institutions access timberland through TIMO-managed separate accounts and commingled funds (Manulife/Hancock, Campbell Global/J.P. Morgan, BTG Pactual, Resource Management Service, Forest Investment Associates, Molpus, and others), benchmarked to the NCREIF Timberland Index; minimums are large and holding periods long [11][18]. Wealthy individuals and family offices buy tracts directly through land brokers, often layering in hunting leases, carbon projects, conservation easements, and periodic HBU parcel sales, and sometimes using 1031 like-kind exchanges [22]. Due diligence should cover title, timber inventory, roads and access, environmental liabilities, fire risk, harvest contracts, tax treatment, manager fees, fund life and redemption terms, and the difference between land owned and land merely managed.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). Near term, the industry faces real headwinds: elevated mortgage rates have held down housing and sawtimber prices, and Southern pulpwood is structurally weak as paper mills close [21]. The longer-term bull case rests on a U.S. housing recovery meeting years of under-building, the reliable tailwind of biological growth, and new monetization from carbon markets and mass timber [19][22]. The clearest near-term catalyst would be lower interest rates feeding a housing rebound that lifts sawtimber demand; consolidation among the large owners is likely to continue. The best opportunities are likely to be property-specific — disciplined acquisition price, sustainable harvest economics, mill access, modest leverage, and credible non-timber upside matter more than acreage alone. None of these outcomes is assured, and the physical risks to standing inventory are permanent features of the asset, not passing ones.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "NAICS 113110 — Timber Tract Operations" (2022). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=113110&input=113110&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, "NAICS 115310 — Support Activities for Forestry" (2022). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=115310&input=115310&year=2022
3. USDA Forest Service, National Woodland Owner Survey Dashboard, 2024–2026. https://research.fs.usda.gov/products/dataandtools/national-woodland-owners-survey-dashboard
4. Congressional Research Service, "U.S. Forest Ownership and Management: Background and Issues for Congress" (R46976), 2021. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46976
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, NAICS 113110, 2023 (released 2025). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Size Standards," 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. Weyerhaeuser Company, Form 10-K for FY2025 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/106535/000119312526051422/wy-20251231.htm
8. Rayonier Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 (SEC), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/52827/000005282726000078/ryn-20260331.htm
9. Rayonier Inc., "Rayonier and PotlatchDeltic Announce Closing of Merger of Equals," 2026. https://ir.rayonier.com/news/news-details/2026/Rayonier-and-PotlatchDeltic-Announce-Closing-of-Merger-of-Equals/default.aspx
10. U.S. News & World Report / Reuters, "Rayonier, PotlatchDeltic to Form Timber Products Giant in $8.2 Billion Merger," 2025. https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2025-10-14/rayonier-potlatchdeltic-to-form-timber-products-giant-in-8-2-billion-merger
11. Forisk Consulting, "North America's Top Timberland Owners and Managers, 2025 Update," 2025. https://forisk.com/north-americas-top-timberland-owners-and-managers-2025-update/
12. Acadian Timber Corp., 2025 Annual Report / financial disclosures, 2026. https://cdn.financialreports.eu/financialreports/media/filings/46517/2026/RNS/46517_rns_2026-02-11_f6afc932-370b-45d5-9986-8cc7fdb9927f.pdf
13. Sierra Pacific Industries, "About Us," 2026. https://spi-ind.com/Home/AboutUs
14. J.D. Irving, "Irving Woodlands LLC Releases Its Annual Outcome-Based Forestry Update for Maine," 2026. https://www.jdirving.com/en/newsroom/irving-woodlands-llc-releases-its-annual-outcome-based-forestry-update-for-maine/
15. Seven Islands Land Company, "Our Company," 2026. https://www.sevenislands.com/our-company/
16. Green Diamond Resource Company, "Green Diamond Management Company," 2026. https://www.greendiamond.com/timberlands/green-diamond-management-company
17. J.P. Morgan Asset Management, "Campbell Global Acquires Emerald Ridge Timberland in Oregon's Pacific Northwest," 2025. https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/about-us/media/press-releases/campbell-global-acquires-emerald-ridge-timberland-in-oregons-pacific-northwest/
18. Nuveen, "Timberland Market Review" (NCREIF Timberland Index returns and characteristics), 2024. https://documents.nuveen.com/Documents/Nuveen/Viewer.aspx?uniqueId=0ada740b-2b56-4176-8726-84659f1bcd81
19. International Woodland Company / New Forests, timberland asset characteristics (biological growth, inflation correlation), 2011–2025. https://www.iwc.dk/timberland-page/
20. NC State Extension, "Timber Sales: A Planning Guide for Landowners," 2023. https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/timber-sales-a-planning-guide-for-landowners
21. Southern Ag Today, "Pine Sawtimber Prices Soften as Pine Pulpwood Continues to Fall," 2026 (TimberMart-South data); University of Georgia CAES, "Timber Situation and 2025 Outlook." https://southernagtoday.org/2026/01/26/pine-sawtimber-prices-soften-as-pine-pulpwood-continues-to-fall/
22. Zhang et al., "Carbon offset as another driver of timberland investment returns in the United States," 2023; industry sources on recreational leases and conservation easements. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368685743_Carbon_offset_as_another_driver_of_timberland_investment_returns_in_the_United_States
23. U.S. Census Bureau, "Monthly New Residential Construction, June 2026," 2026. https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
24. UNECE / FAO, "Forest Products Annual Market Review 2023–2024," 2024. https://unece.org/forests/publications/forest-products-annual-market-review-2023-2024
25. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Overview of Clean Water Act Section 404," 2026. https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/overview-clean-water-act-section-404
26. U.S. House Office of the Law Revision Counsel, "16 U.S.C. §1538: Prohibited Acts" (Endangered Species Act), 2026. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&num=0&req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title16-section1538
27. Internal Revenue Service, "Instructions for Form 1120-REIT," 2025. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1120rei
28. The Motley Fool, "Best Timberland REITs and How to Invest," 2025 (REIT structure and sector consolidation history). https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/timberland-reit/