Your North Carolina Building Site Has Timber on It: How to Get It Cleared, Sometimes for Free

You've got a wooded parcel in North Carolina, a site plan, and a grading contractor whose bid has a line for clearing and grubbing. That line is money out. This guide is about turning some of it into money in, or at least zero, and about the two rules that can cost you a permit if you do it in the wrong order.

Most of what's on this site is written for a family with 20 acres. This page is for the person with a schedule. Every rule in it is North Carolina's; other states have their own versions and their own guides here as we research them.

The trees are a cost to you and a product to somebody else

A grading contractor clears a site by pushing the trees over, piling them, and burning or grinding the pile. You pay for the machine time, and the wood is gone. A logger looks at the same trees and sees loads. Pine sawtimber is worth five to seven times what pine pulpwood brings, per the N.C. Forest Service, and a mature stand on a flat site with a road to it is about the easiest job a logging crew ever gets.

That's why the deal exists. A logger, or a timber buyer with a crew, comes in ahead of the grader, cuts the merchantable timber, hauls it to the mills he already sells to, and keeps the money from the wood. In exchange he charges you nothing, or he pays you for the stumpage on top. What's left is stumps and brush, which is a much smaller job for the grading contractor than a standing forest.

It's common for developers to hand the timber to the grading contractor as part of the clearing price. One Carolina consulting firm puts it bluntly: the timber is generally of little value to the developer and is many times given away. That's a choice, and often it's the wrong one, because the grader is not set up to merchandise logs and doesn't price your job as if he were.

When it works, and when it doesn't

The free-clearing deal works when three things are true.

There's enough merchantable timber. Sawtimber-size pine or hardwood, in enough volume to fill trucks. Twenty acres of 30-year-old pine, yes. Two acres of scrub and sweetgum, no. A logger will tell you in one walk-through.

A truck can get to it. A log truck needs a way in and somewhere to turn around. A site off a paved road with a planned entrance is ideal. A landlocked parcel behind a subdivision is a different price.

The schedule allows it. A logging job on a 20-acre site is a matter of days to a couple of weeks, weather permitting. It has to happen before the grader mobilizes, not during.

When the timber is thin or the access is bad, you may still get the wood hauled at no charge instead of paid for, or you'll pay the clearing contractor and ask him to deck the logs separately so a buyer can pick them up. Either way, ask. The worst case is he says it isn't worth his trip, and you've lost a phone call.

Rule one: this is land clearing, not forestry, and the state knows the difference

North Carolina requires an erosion and sedimentation control plan for any land-disturbing activity that will disturb more than one acre. The plan has to be filed with the state, or your local program, at least 30 days before you start. The state fee is $119 per acre. The penalty for starting without one runs up to $5,000 per day per violation. Local programs can be stricter than the state.

Ordinary timber harvesting is exempt from that plan, as long as it follows the state's Forest Practice Guidelines for water quality. That exemption is where people get clever, and where they get caught. The N.C. Forest Service says it plainly: when land is going to be developed, or converted to a use that isn't forestry, the work is considered land clearing, not a timber harvest, and it's referred to the erosion control program. Cutting the trees under a "forestry" label the month before the dozers arrive is not forestry. The Forest Service decides what the purpose was, not you.

So the order of operations is: erosion control plan approved, then cut. The logger can do his work under your approved plan. He can't substitute his exemption for it.

Rule two: the tree ordinance, and the three-year wait

Cities and counties in North Carolina can't regulate forestry on land that's taxed as forestland or managed under a forester's plan. But state law gives them a hammer for exactly the case above. If a tract is harvested under the forestry exemption in a way that removes substantially all the trees a local ordinance would have required you to keep, the local government can refuse to issue development permits on that tract for three years. If the cutting was a willful violation, five years.

Read that as a developer. Three years without a building permit on a parcel you're carrying. It's the most expensive shortcut in the business.

Raleigh, for example, requires tree conservation areas on any subdivision or site plan for a parcel of two acres or more: 15 percent of the net site in the R-1 and R-2 districts, 10 percent everywhere else, with rules about which trees count. Wake County and most Triangle towns have their own versions. Your site plan will show the conservation area. The logger needs to see that plan before the first tree comes down, and the trees inside the line stay.

One more tax point. If the parcel was enrolled in present-use value as forestland, converting it to development triggers rollback: three years of the deferred taxes, with interest. That's usually the seller's problem at closing, but if you bought it enrolled, it's yours.

How to run it

1. Get the site plan and tree conservation requirement settled first. You need to know which trees are staying before anyone can price the ones that are going.
2. Get the erosion and sedimentation control plan approved. Thirty days minimum. Start it now.
3. Have the timber looked at. Call two or three timber buyers or loggers who work your county and ask them to walk it. They'll tell you what's merchantable and whether they'd clear it for the wood, pay for it, or need to be paid. Get it in writing. The Forest Service tells landowners to get at least three bids and never sell without a written agreement, and that advice doesn't change because you're a developer.
4. Give the logger the approved plan and the conservation map. He works inside both.
5. Then the grader. Stumps, brush, grading. A smaller bid than the one you started with.

One more way this gets done, and it may be the easiest: ask your grading contractor whether he already has a logger he calls. The good ones do. A grader who can hand off the merchantable timber to a crew that hauls it away has less to push, grind and burn, and gets paid the same by you. If he doesn't have that contact, the loggers on this site who list development clearing are the ones to put him in touch with.

If you'd rather not run the bids yourself, a consulting forester will do it for a share of the sale, and on a site with real timber that share usually pays for itself. On a site with little timber, skip the consultant and just get the buyers to walk it.

Who to call

The loggers and timber buyers on this site are listed by county, with what they buy and the counties they'll drive to. Some of them do development clearing as a matter of course; their listings say so. Start with your county page, and if nobody there does this kind of work, use the contact form, tell us the county and the acreage, and we'll tell you who does.