Devin Stockfish
Analyst · Bank of Montreal. Please proceed with your question.
Yes, sure. Happy to. So, really, Mark, when we think about doing acquisitions or divestitures, for that matter, for us, it's very specific to that individual land base. And so, certainly, we look at comps to get a sense of what the market looks like. But when we are doing our future cash flow projections, it really goes down to things that are specific to that land, the stocking level, the species mix, what we think the road infrastructure looks like, what we think the costs of logging and hauling in that region are going to be. So, we do a very, very detailed analysis, we have some tools that we have that I think are proprietary that help with that to really dial-in on what we think that the cash flow will look like over a period of time. And we layer on top of that what do the local market conditions look like and we have a pretty good sense because we're in all of these markets on what we expect market dynamics to look like. And then we layer on top of that what are the synergies that we can bring to that specific land, things like leveraging our scale to drive lower log and haul costs, finding opportunities for export or alternative values like solar, wind, HBU. So, our model bakes all of those things in. And when we look at that particular land down in Alabama, a few things really jump out. It's in a very good market. I would say that Pine Hill, Alabama market is one of the stronger markets in the area, it's growing both on the saw timber side, but importantly it's a strong fiber market which can really help the economics of owning timberland. We've got an expanding mill capacity. We've got a diverse set of customers there that we think we can really leverage to drive additional value on that. And it really fits well with our existing timberlands portfolio. We have people on the ground there, so we don't have to add a lot of personnel to manage this incremental land. So, when we look at all of these things, good species mix, good site index, good synergies, logistics benefits, it's a really good property for us, it's really one of the better properties that we've looked at in quite a while in the South. And so, we're really excited to add that to the portfolio.