Stumpage Price Database

Data is a primary building block for Forest2Market's stumpage price products and services. We adhere to strict and consistent standards in the collection, quality control and security of this data.


Products and Services

From our stumpage price database, we offer five products/services:

  • Timber Owner Market Guide
  • Online Pricing Services — Landowner package, Small Business package, Regional package
  • 4Cast
  • Resource Studies
  • Custom Analytics

Data Collection

Forest2Market has a unique data collection process.

For our stumpage pricing products and services, the data is collected at the transaction level. We don't survey data contributors, we require written confirmation of contract terms. Forest2Market collects data from both buyers and sellers and often receives multiple reports of the same transaction, which eliminates the risk of bias in pricing. We differentiate between lump sum and per unit sales, which allows us to hone in on true prices of lump sum sales. We also gain insight into demand by requiring all bids to be reported.

The data attributes that we collect include:

Track Attributes

Sale Attributes

  • Accessibility
  • Loggability
  • Quality
  • Stand type
  • Location
  • Rainfall and weather patterns
  • Buyer type
  • Seller type
  • Price by product
  • Volume by product
  • Type of sale
  • Species
  • Product
  • Average DBH (diameter at breast height)

Data Quality

Forest2Market receives timber sale transaction data between buyers and sellers of timber on a daily basis. Each transaction received is carefully and thoroughly reviewed by a staff of professional foresters before being entered into the database.

Geography faculty at the University of North Carolina like to point out that in 1986, those who graduated with a major in Geography had the highest average starting salaries in the class — $250,000. The punchline to this joke is that basketball legend, Michael Jordon, graduated from UNC with a major in Geography in 1986. In that particular dataset, Michael Jordan is clearly an outlier whose astronomical earnings skew the results and obscure the real market for geography majors.

Because Forest2Market receives such a high volume of timber sale transaction reports, it is common that a number of reported prices "fall outside the norm," or exhibit a high or low amount of variability. Since a market is made up of a continuum of prices — from high to low — one would and should expect variability in market data.

Forest2Market's staff of foresters carefully reviews the market variables affecting timber prices. In some cases, variability driven by bias, inconsistent data handling practices or differing valuation standards among contributors produces outliers that exacerbate market variability.

To avoid this type of excess variability, Forest2Market uses a "data normalization process" to account for excess variability, thus allowing only market factors to influence prices. View a flowchart of the data normalization process.

Forest2Market also uses programmed database checks of new sales against old ones to prevent duplicates, which would also skew results.


Data Security and Customer Privacy

Forest2Market takes extraordinary measures to keep all data confidential and secure. We value the privacy of our customers. As a result, we:

  • Aggregate data and report it anonymously
  • Generalize acreage so that tracts cannot be identified
  • Never provide detail more specific than county so that tracts cannot be identified