Roseburg Resources, out of Sprinfield, OR, is selling 170,000 acres of timberland in Siskiyou and Shasta counties an Australia management firm, according to the Mail Tribune Thursday. Roseburg has operations in three Northwest states, including a medium density fiberboard plant in Medford, and four Southeast states. The buyer is New Forests, a US$3 billion firm based in Sydney, Australia, with offices in San Francisco, Singapore and New Zealand. It manages more than 2 million acres of land and forests globally.
Last July, Roseburg announced it was building an engineered wood plant planned for Chester, SC, then in September it closed on a deal to secure 158,000 acres of timberland in Virginia and North Carolina.
Roseburg acquired the former Sierra Pine medium density fiberboard plant off North Pacific Highway for US$60 million in September 2015. Medium density fiberboard is produced with scraps and byproducts from Roseburg and other wood products operations here and throughout Southern Oregon, spokesperson Rebecca Taylor said.
Elsewhere, Québec City’s Solifor, which harvests and manages forests on both sides of the border, announced Wednesday it bought its second property in Maine, the Ste-Aurelie Timberlands in Somerset County, for US$30 million. The deal is for the nearly 62,000 acres, or 96 square miles, of forest, which is half the size of the island of Montréal. The former Maine owner’s name was not disclosed.
Solifor last May paid $25 million for 69,000 acres of forest slightly north of the recently purchased land, which abuts the Canadian border, Solifor spokesman Patrick McQuilken said. There are no immediate plans to acquire more forest land in Maine, he said.