Thousands of acres of forest throughout the Sierra Nevada will go to the highest bidder next month in an auction that has become a regular occurrence for Sierra Pacific Industries, California's largest private landowner.
Among the nearly 5,000 acres the logging company has put up for sale this year is a 338-acre tract of Nevada County land along the upper reaches of the South Yuba River west of Truckee. Other parcels include properties near the Feather River north of Sierra Valley.
The properties represent a minute fraction of the timber company's 1.7 million acres of ownership in the state. The company said it chose the parcels because they don't fit into the logging giant's future plans.
"We have a series of these properties that are isolated," said company spokesman Mark Pawlicki. "They don't sit near where our mills are."
The Nevada County property is close to recreation and far removed from other timber land, said Pawlicki, making it a natural candidate for the auction block. And, despite a variable California real estate market, auctioneers say demand for the fairly remote, wild and undeveloped land is still high.
John Rosenthal, the president of Realty Marketing Northwest, a Portland, Oregon-based company that has handled property auctions for Sierra Pacific Industries over the last 16 years, said he expects multiple bids to come in by the Nov. 14 deadline, promising a competitive price for the land.
"There's still a strong demand for rural properties," Rosenthal said.
The collection of 18 California properties for sale run up and down the spine of the Sierra Nevada mountain range as well as on the North Coast - from Tuolomne County in the south to Trinity County in the north.
"This is probably one of the larger [auctions] we've offered in terms of number of tracts," Rosenthal said.
All but one of the properties are designated as "Timber Production Zone" - a zoning that exempts timber harvesters from paying taxes on the property's real estate potential while it is used for logging. It typically takes 10 years to convert a property from "Timber Production Zone" to another zoning, without paying back taxes - a conversion that a county's board of supervisors must approve.
Rosenthal said the properties generate interest from people who want to extract the timber, and also from "someone who has made money in the stock market and wants to put it into some dirt."
Source: Tahoe Daily Tribune
