Whether a person likes it or not, this is the private timberland game in the NE. Willing buyer/willing seller. Unfortunately the asking price of $1547 per acre is far above the sustainable timber value of the property (usually 300 to 500 per acre). Therefore there are four general types of buyers that will be interested. Conservation buyers, individuals with spare cash who dont care about return, businesses that will figure a way out of making some short term cash and businesses that will figure out a way of making enough short term return to drive the book value down to sustainable timber value.
I perceive that the play on this property will be publicize the fact that it is in peril and get congressional action to add it to the WMNF (not sure if its in the declaration boundary of the forest). It happened with Lake Tarleton a few years back. TPL (trust for public lands) will fund the initial purchase (once they have assurances that some organization or public agency will ultimately buy it). NH did one of these transactions a few years back for a large block of land in Pittsburg, the state retained the development rights and critical conservations lands, then resold the rest of the land for sustainable logging. Given its proximity to Squam lake, the Squam lake association may be another lead group.
Individuals with spare cash with a conservation intent are always around but
there are a lot of other large parcels availlable at a lower price.
The scariest is the "short term investor", they would high grade log the property (easy to do with NH's minimal cutting regulations), then after its cut, threaten to cut it into camp lots until some conservation group bought the property from them. Note everyone would decry the proposition, but more than a few would most likely get on the waiting list to buy a cheap camp lot in the white mountains for $3000 an acre (there are occasional threads on VFFT on where to buy cheap lots in the mountains.
The "long term investor" would buy the property, line up the sale of development rights to a conservation organization, keep the raw land then log it "hard" under the pretense of timberstand improvement for several years, then sell what was left to a timber investment trust or to a short term investor(who would cut what was left), or pull a Plum Creek Deal and announce a planned development.
By the way, the local towns have the incentive to have options 3 and 4 as they get 10 % of the value of the wood that gets cut off the property.
