“As a property owner, you’ve got this vast amount of acreage, said Bob Seidenschwarz of S.G. Long. “The challenge is how do you unlock the value? If you’re a timber company, you can cut trees down, plane it, and sell the timber. Becoming an REIT allowed them different ways of unlocking the value.”

Plum Creek became a REIT in 1999 -- the first timber company to take advantage of the new format. At the time, it owned about 3.2 million acres of timberland. It quickly started unloading some of its already-harvested property, starting with 89,000 acres to the Blackfoot Challenge in 2004 for $70 million. The Montana Legacy Project followed, passing 310,000 acres at a total cost of $490 million.

“Almost every major timber company that owned a lot of land has changed its business mode from one big company to many smaller companies, each in charge of a different aspect,” said Peter Kolb, Montana State University extension forester. “In my perspective, that’s not a good thing. Thirty years ago, there were 16 or 17 major corporate timber companies, who owned the bulk of the private timberland across the U.S. Every single one of them is gone now.”

That split between large and small timber businesses has some fascinating financial side effects, according to retired University of Montana forestry economist Alan McQuillan.