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Question; if you get a raw land appraisal and say worth $1000/acre. Then you get the timber cruised and you get x value for the timber. for a selling price do you get to add timber value to the per acre price and now the land per acre is worth $1000 + X?

I’m not sure how a formal appraisal treats it, but there’s a little more to it for comparing properties from a buying and selling standpoint. There are many other factors that may make a property worth a certain price. Some are more important to certain buyers than others.

When I had conversations with a land bank, it seemed that the rec land appraisal process was much less rigorous than what I would have done on my own prior to selecting a tract to make an offer on.

My Experience is No.
I just boguht some land and it appraised for $X/acre..that is what it is worth (in the appraisal world) Had it been without timber it would have been less than $X/acre because it didn't have the timber.
I wondered how the appraisal thing was going to work anyway because most appraiser's are not foresters, but i think they try to add a little value to the appraisal if it is timbered. I'm a forester and I have only done soemthign liek you are speaking of once, it was for an estate and the attorney's got me to crusie it and put a rough value on it, btu I don't think that was for realestate/selling value. The glory days of buying land and then cutting the timber to pay for it are over, most of the time the timber is figured into the land price....I think.. If you find a place that is selling for a good price and has timber on it, you better get it

Historically, most appraiser would have gathered sale without timber and then add the timber’s value, based upon a cruise, there are still some appraisers that do it that way, but at that time we were dealing with much less valuable land and, at the time, that was how the real estate market figured out what to sell or buy a tract for, now due to recreation, cutover timberland still has pretty substantial value, best bet on figuring out what a place is worth is to compare apples to apples, find similarly located and similarly timbered tracts to compare, if a sale has less timber, adjust up, or more timber, adjust down, some places (only a few) have so much timber you could get away with select harvest and not diminish (or very little diminishment) in value, some markets (usually the ones that are not good rec. areas) still add land and timber

Recently turned loose of 130 acres..... I wanted the best price for myself and the fairest price for the buyer.....hired a registered forester for a timber appraisal, then a certified land appraiser for the land appraisal.....added the two prices together, then added half the cost of the two appraisals to my asking price.....cost me a few bucks extra, but everyone ended up happy, happy, happy.

Bare land value plus timber value plus recreational value. Recreational value can be a number pulled out of the air.

Neighborhood, improvements, access to utilities, CRP income, presence of other easements, terrain, access, road frontage are all part of a semi-endless list of other things a smart buyer considers when assessing value of their potential investment. An appraisal may or may not.

here's a challenge....

get two different appraisers to appraise the same property and see if they come back with the same answer.

Tail wags the dog...