Written by HLRBO Staff|
Last updated
On January 30, 2026, Rayonier and PotlatchDeltic closed a merger of equals that put more than 4 million acres of American timberland under a single owner, and a meaningful share of that ground is the kind hunters lease. For the hunt clubs and families who lease it, the owner behind the gate just changed, and in some counties the price on the permit changed first.
One landlord, four million acres
The merger, announced October 14, 2025 and closed January 30, 2026, combined roughly 4.2 million acres across 11 states: about 3.2 million acres in the U.S. South and 931,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest, including PotlatchDeltic's Idaho holdings. The all-stock exchange valued PotlatchDeltic shares at $44.11 apiece at announcement, and about $3.25 billion in total stock by the time the deal closed, inside a combined enterprise worth $8.2 billion. After reviewing alternatives, the company announced on March 31, 2026, that it would keep the Rayonier name and its RYN ticker on the NYSE. The combined company runs six sawmills, a plywood mill, real estate developments, and a rural land sales program. The merger announcement named Atlanta as the combined company's planned headquarters.
"We are excited to close this strategic merger of equals," said Mark McHugh, the combined company's president and CEO, in the closing announcement, "and we are confident that combining these two exceptional land resources companies will generate meaningful value creation for our shareholders and other stakeholders."
Shareholders are one set of stakeholders. Hunters are another, and both legacy companies run substantial recreation businesses aimed at them. Rayonier sells what its land resources page describes as "exclusive hunting and recreation access to individuals as well as hunt clubs through the sale of license agreements" across its Southern forests, plus recreation permits and campsite leases in the Pacific Northwest. The same page states that both firms' customer hunting portals (Rayonier Hunting, PotlatchDeltic Idaho, and PotlatchDeltic South) remain active and accessible under the merged banner. For now, the practical experience of leasing from either company looks unchanged. The ownership behind it does not.
The ground that gets sold
Consolidation is only half of what a timber REIT does with land. The other half is disposition, and Rayonier spent the two years before the merger demonstrating it at scale.
In November 2023 the company announced a plan to sell $1 billion of assets to pay down debt. On November 6, 2024, it announced dispositions totaling $495 million: roughly 200,000 acres at about $2,475 per acre, split between approximately 91,000 acres in southeast Oklahoma and approximately 109,000 acres on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, sold in four transactions to what the release called "high-caliber institutional investors." The release named none of them. On June 30, 2025, Rayonier completed the sale of its New Zealand business for $710 million, bringing the program to $1.45 billion, well past its target.
Read those two facts together. Two hundred thousand American acres, much of it long-standing hunting ground in Oklahoma and on the Olympic Peninsula, changed hands in a single quarter, and the hunters leasing it learned who their new landlord was only if the new landlord chose to say. Institutional buyers of timberland are under no obligation to continue a recreation program, honor a lease's renewal expectations, or keep a gate open at all. Some do. Some do not. The lease sits on the land, but the lease term is short and the land trades long.
None of this is a Rayonier invention. It is how the whole asset class works now. Over the past three decades most of the big integrated forest products companies converted to REITs or sold their timberland to investment managers, which means the ground under a hunt club lease is no longer a family asset or even a mill's supply base. It is a line item in a portfolio, held while it performs and sold when the spread between public and private timberland values says sell, which is precisely the logic Rayonier's own disposition announcements cite. Western hunters have seen this lesson before in the access fights on checkerboard ground: the ownership map, not the hunter, decides what can be reached. The hunter's season runs one year. The portfolio's clock runs on a different calendar entirely.
What it costs in Wahkiakum County
To see where this goes at ground level, look at two timber counties on the Washington coast, where the Chinook Observer reported on March 15, 2026 that getting a family through a hunting season on corporate ground now runs into four figures.
Shawn Jacob, who runs a boat repair business, laid his access permits on the counter for the reporter. "You see all these permits I got? It's money," he said. "That one was almost $600, that one was $300." Gabe Bergman, a Wahkiakum County gunsmith, put the family math plainly: "When you're raising kids, and the kids can't hunt off of your permit, now you got to buy multiple permits for the kids, and you're spending $2,000 to $3,000 by the time you're done," a figure he said covers fuel and permits together, "just to get out."
The permits in question come principally from Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier, the dominant timberland owners in Wahkiakum and Pacific counties. County government has noticed. Wahkiakum County Commissioner Dan Cothren told the Observer his constituents "are calling and asking, 'Well, what can we do? This is our heritage, this is our history, and we can't get access to these lands — we're willing to pay.'" His county is weighing a trucking tax on timber operators. Pacific County Commissioner Lisa Olsen, whose county is considering raising road fees, went at the property tax break timberland enjoys: "They're getting huge fees for people to do this, and I don't think they should be getting their exemptions if that's what they're going to do."
The sting in those counties is historical as much as financial. The Observer's reporting notes that the region's older timber owners, Crown Zellerbach and Weyerhaeuser among them, once let employees and locals onto company ground during hunting season as a matter of course. Free access was part of the compact of a timber town. The permits Jacob spread on his counter are the receipt for that compact's expiration, and they explain why the anger is aimed less at any single price than at the fact that a price now exists.
And the pay-to-hunt model is not the worst case on the map. A companion Observer report from March 9 found that land managed for unnamed investment clients by American Forest Management, which oversees about 255,000 acres in Washington and Oregon, is largely gated with no permit offered at any price. "When the gates went in, maybe they'd open up for two weeks for access, and then they'd shut it off," Cothren said. In those counties the choice is not between a free hunt and a $600 permit. It is between a $600 permit and a locked gate.
The strongest case for the corporate lease
The argument for the corporate lease is a real one. Corporate recreation programs have kept more private ground open to more hunters, for longer, than any other private arrangement in American history. No individual landowner offers a map-searchable inventory of hundreds of thousands of huntable acres the way Rayonier's licensing program does. Weyerhaeuser told the Observer it maintains nearly 20,000 acres of free-to-hunt land across Clark, Cowlitz, Pacific, and Wahkiakum counties alongside its paid permits. Lease and permit revenue helps fund road maintenance, fire protection, and habitat work on working forests that would otherwise have no recreation budget at all. Rayonier spokesperson Jane Wilder made exactly this case: "Our system is intended to balance local access with the rising operational costs necessary to maintain healthy, accessible forestlands, and the vital wildlife habitat within them."
The American Forest Management gates prove the defense's sharpest point. A permit system, whatever it costs, beats no system. Hunters who spent the 1990s and 2000s on timber company leases got decades of access that pure investment owners increasingly decline to offer.
The Wahkiakum record points at the defense's one structural weakness, and it is not the price. It is that every term of the arrangement is set by one party and can be reset by one party. A permit program that exists at a company's discretion can be repriced, restructured, or ended at the same discretion, and when the company itself is merged or its land is sold, the hunter is not at the table. Nobody in Wahkiakum County negotiated the $600 permit. Nobody leasing those 91,000 Oklahoma acres was consulted on the sale.
Where displaced hunt clubs land
Set the two ownership models side by side. The merged Rayonier holds roughly 4.2 million acres under a single corporate landlord. HLRBO's marketplace, by comparison, lists 6,200-plus hunting properties covering about 1.5 million acres across the country, per HLRBO data, and those listings belong to thousands of individual landowners rather than one. Run the division and the average HLRBO listing is about 242 acres, which means it would take roughly 17,000 of them to assemble what one company now controls, and it means the merged REIT holds nearly three times the acreage of the entire owner-direct marketplace, though Rayonier does not disclose how much of its ground is actually under hunting license. One landlord on one side. Thousands on the other.
Owner-direct leases have prices too, and nobody should pretend a private 200-acre lease in a good deer county is cheap. What the decentralized model offers is not a discount. It is a counterparty who picks up the phone, a lease agreement two named parties actually sign, and the simple arithmetic that when one landowner among thousands sells or reprices, one club goes looking, not every club in two counties at once. Hunters priced out of or sold out from under a corporate program need somewhere to land, and a marketplace where they can lease directly from a landowner is a working alternative, alongside public ground, when the institutional door closes.
There is also a version of this story where the two models need each other. Corporate programs absorb the volume, the hunt clubs of 40 members and 4,000 acres, that no individual landowner can host. Owner-direct leases absorb the shocks, one club and one property at a time, when a program reprices a county or a portfolio sells a township. A displaced club rarely finds 4,000 contiguous acres on the private market. It finds 300 here and 500 there, splits into smaller camps, and signs with owners it can meet. Some of those owners now sell hunting access by the hunter rather than by the property, which fits a splintered club better than a whole-farm lease does. That is a loss of scale and a gain of standing, and every club priced out of corporate ground gets to decide which mattered more.
Wherever your lease sits, corporate or private, the same homework applies. Know who actually owns the ground, not just who manages it, which a county parcel search will tell you in ten minutes. Know what your agreement says happens on a sale. Know your renewal date, and start the conversation a season early, because the stories above suggest the notice, when it comes, will be short.
The consolidation is not finished. The counties on the Washington coast will vote on their timber taxes, and somewhere an unnamed institutional investor is deciding what to do with 109,000 acres of the Olympic Peninsula. Dan Cothren's warning is the one to sit with. "Something's gonna happen," he said. "Just too many people on one spot."