"I haven't heard that Harvard Management Company is back in the market for timberland.in the June post "Investing in Timber and Farmland" I've been struck these last few days by how far afield investors are going to generate returns.
Their sales, beginning in 2005 were pretty timely and as recently as May of this year they were still in liquidation mode."
From Institutional Investor:
TIAA-CREF Deal for Timberland a Sign of the Times?
Forget the summer’s wildfires. Timberland is heating up as an asset, with major acquisitions of two Portland, Oregon-based timberland asset managers announced in less than a month. And now with a big pension-fund manager getting in on the action, one can’t help but wonder if other pension funds will see upide here.
In mid-July, the Hancock Timber Resource Group of Boston and the Molpus Woodlands Group of Jackson, Mississippi, bought out the assets of Forest Capital Partners in a deal with an undisclosed price tag, and they split its huge 1.88 million acre portfolio. Hancock got 1.35 million acres in Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, while Molpus got 535,000 acres in Louisiana, Idaho, and Minnesota. Hancock Timber, which is owned by Manulife Asset Management of Boston, manages about 6.6 million acres of timberland in the U.S. and abroad, while Molpus currently manages about 1.5 million acres of timberland investments in seventeen states.
On July 31, TIAA-CREF, the New York City-based asset manager with $481 billion in assets under management, acquired an 80 percent interest in GreenWood Resources, also for an undisclosed amount. TIAA-CREF said that with the addition of GreenWood, its timberland portfolio grew to a total of 840,000 acres worldwide, worth about $1.8 billion....MORE
