Rayonier at Citi’s Property Conference: Strategic Land Use Shift

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Rayonier Inc. (NYSE: RYN) participated in Citi’s 30th Annual Global Property CEO Conference 2025. CEO Mark McHugh outlined the company’s strategic evolution from a traditional timber REIT to a diversified land resources company. While the focus on maximizing land value through innovative uses was highlighted, challenges such as policy risks and market fluctuations were also acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• Rayonier is transitioning from timber production to land-based solutions, including carbon capture and solar projects.
• The company completed $740 million in asset dispositions at a high EBITDA multiple.
• Long-term EBITDA targets are set at $30 million by 2027 and $75 million by 2030 for land-based solutions.
• Rayonier’s net debt to adjusted EBITDA has decreased, showing financial improvement.
• The company is exploring strategic alternatives for its New Zealand portfolio.

Financial Results

• 70% of Rayonier’s 2024 adjusted EBITDA was derived from timber segments, with the remaining 30% from real estate.
• Dispositions worth $740 million were completed at a 44 times EBITDA multiple.
• Net debt to adjusted EBITDA was 2.8 times, with a target leverage of less than three times.
• Weighted average cost of debt is 2.5%, fully fixed, with an average maturity of four years.
• HBU sales price per acre increased from $2,800 to $4,500 from 2015-2017 to 2021-2024.

Operational Updates

• Rayonier is focusing on alternative land uses such as CCS and solar projects.
• The company has a 120,000-acre development pipeline, including projects in Florida and Georgia.
• Over 150,000 acres are under CCS lease, up from zero in 2022.
• Challenges include permitting processes for CCS and FERC rule changes impacting solar projects.

Future Outlook

• Rayonier aims for $30 million in EBITDA from land-based solutions by 2027, growing to $75 million by 2030.
• Significant growth is expected in utility solar capacity and CCS demand.
• The company plans to continue its asset disposition program and evaluate strategic alternatives.
• Policy risks, particularly regarding IRA incentives for CCS, could impact growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Rayonier acts as a lessor for solar and CCS projects, focusing on rental income without capital risk.
• Bipartisan support exists for IRA incentives, though CCS is more dependent on these.
• Standardization is needed in voluntary carbon markets, with Rayonier evaluating pilot projects.
• Executive orders on lumber are expected to have limited near-term impact, primarily in the Pacific Northwest.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Citi’s 30th Annual Global Property CEO Conference 2025:

Anthony Petneri, City Research: Good morning. I’m Anthony Petneri with City Research, and we’re very pleased to have with us Raynier and CEO Mark McHugh. This session is for Citi clients only and disclosures have been made available at the corporate access desk. To ask a question, you can raise your hand or go to liveqanda.com and enter code GPC25 to submit questions. Mark, we’re going to turn it over to you to introduce Rainier, and then we’ll move right into Q and A.

So thank you.

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: All right. Thanks, Anthony, and thank you to Citi for hosting us here today. I’ll spend maybe ten or fifteen minutes providing a quick overview of Rayonier for those that are less familiar with the story, and then we can leave the balance of the time for Q and A. For those who are listening on the webcast, I’ll be referencing the latest conference presentation that’s available on our website. So starting on Page three, here we’ve provided a brief snapshot of where we are today.

Rayonier is one of three publicly traded Timber Eats, but we tend to think of ourselves as the only pure play Timber Eats and that we don’t own or operate any downstream with products manufacturing assets. And that generally translates to less cyclical volatility in our cash flows over time relative to the peers. The company was founded in 1926, so almost a one hundred year history. Today, we own or lease roughly 2,500,000 acres of timberland, generating a sustainable yield of roughly 10,000,000 tons annually. The chart on the right here shows our adjusted EBITDA breakdown in 2024.

As you can see, roughly 70% of our EBITDA came from our Timber segments with the balance of roughly 30% coming from our Real Estate segment. And this mix between Timber EBITDA and Real Estate EBITDA has been pretty consistent over time. So that’s a snapshot of where we are today, but I want to spend the next few minutes talking about how we see our business evolving into the future. And it starts with a couple of major trends that we believe are really going to drive increased demand for land and timber going forward. The first is the energy transition.

The need for renewable power and decarbonization solutions continues to grow. And that’s especially true today with the rapid development of AI and the power hungry data centers needed to support this technology. We really see this as a secular trend that’s going to drive increased demand for our land based solutions going forward. The second trend is a favorable long term outlook for The U. S.

Housing market. The U. S. Housing sector remains significantly under built. Depending on what study you look at, that housing shortage is generally thought to be somewhere in the range of 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 units.

So despite the challenging financing backdrop that we currently find ourselves in, we think the long term momentum in home new home construction should remain pretty constructive. So as these trends reshape our industry, they’re also reshaping how we really think about our business model. Increasingly, we’ve come to see ourselves as not just a timber company, but really more of a land resources company. And as a land resources company, we’re looking to maximize the value of our portfolio in a multitude of different ways. And in particular, we expect that over time, some portion of our lands will become much more valuable for alternative uses, such as land based solutions and real estate development.

So why does this matter? Slide six illustrates why we’re so excited about these new opportunities. And what this chart shows is a potential value uplift per acre that we believe can be achieved from transitioning land use. So for example, if you take an acre of Southern Timberland that has an average value in the range of $2,000 to $3,000 per acre, and you’re able to transition that acre into a carbon capture and storage lease, that has the potential to increase the value of that acre by up to five times. If you’re able to transition an acre into a solar lease or an unimproved development use, that has the potential to increase the value of that acre by up to 10 times.

And if you’re able to transition that acre into an improved development use, that has the potential to increase the value of that acre by up to 15 times. So we see significant value creation potential from optimizing our land use across the portfolio. And as we grow the number of acres within our portfolio that can be converted into these higher value uses over time, we see this as translating to significant value growth for the company. So moving on to Page seven, we’ve laid out our vision for Rayonier, and it’s really pretty simple. Our vision is to realize the full potential of our land resources in meeting the needs of society.

And what this really means is that we want to be in a position to identify and execute on the highest value use for every acre in our portfolio, whether that’s timber production, land based solutions or higher and better use real estate. And if we can achieve this across our land base, we believe that value creation potential could be quite significant. So now moving on to Slide eight, I want to touch briefly on some of our key competitive advantages. First, Rainier has a best in class timberland portfolio located in some of the most attractive timber markets globally. Second, we have a differentiated real estate platform with a demonstrated track record of optimizing HBU values and premiums.

And third, our portfolio is uniquely well positioned to capture these transformative land based solutions opportunities. So let me drill down into each of these in a bit more detail. Slide nine provides an overview of our Timberland holdings by region. As I noted earlier, we own or lease roughly 2,500,000 acres and some of the most attractive softwood markets in the world. And that includes roughly 1,800,000 acres in The U.

S. South, roughly 310,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest and about 410,000 acres in New Zealand. Another key feature of our portfolios are concentration in some of the best markets in The U. S. South.

As you can see on Slide 10, over 70% of our timberlands are located in The U. S. South, and the majority of these lands are located in top quartile markets as measured by Timber Mart South composite average pricing. The chart on the right shows our EBITDA per acre performance relative to the Nacreve South index. And as you can see over the past six years, our average EBITDA per acre has been over 40% higher than the Nacre Cove South Index.

So again, this chart really highlights that relative quality differential of our Southern portfolio. Now turning to our real estate platform. Slide 11 shows the range of real estate categories that we participate in. The first two, non strategic and rural, these are really the bread and butter of our real estate business. Historically, we’ve sold anywhere from 1% to 2% of our Southern lands annually, generally at premiums in the range of 50% to 100% above Timberland value.

And this really forms the core of our recurring HBU business. The next two categories, unimproved development and approved development, these are the areas where we really see the most significant growth opportunity going forward. Unimproved development consists of properties where we’ve invested in entitlements and land use planning, but we haven’t made investments in horizontal infrastructure improvements. These tend to be high value, but relatively isolated parcels of land where we don’t have significant adjacent land holdings. Improved development, on the other hand, are areas where we’ve invested in entitlements and land use planning, but we’ve actually taken that next step and invested in horizontal infrastructure improvements as well.

We generally only do this in very select areas where we have large adjacent land holdings that stand to benefit from those investments. So these are the major categories that comprise our real estate HBU business. Now moving to our performance in the HBU business. The chart on the left shows how our HBU values and premiums have evolved over the last decade. As you can see, we generated a significant increase in our average HBU sales price per acre, going from roughly $2,800 per acre in 2015 to 2017, to roughly $4,500 per acre in 2021 to 2024.

We also generated a significant increase in the premium realized over the NACREF index. That premium went from 55% to almost 120% over those same time periods. In addition, we’ve seen a significant shift in our mix toward these higher value development sales. Those development sales comprised just 15% of our revenue, real estate revenue in 2015 to 2017, but increased to 44% in this most recent four year period. And what’s really driving that mix shift is the momentum that we’ve gained in our Wildlight and Heartwood development projects.

Slide 13 provides a high level overview of our 120,000 acre development pipeline as well as a map of our holdings in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, where much of this acreage is located. Again, we only pursue improved development projects in areas that have both strong market ready demand and where we have significant land holdings. And the two primary areas where we’ve done this to date are in our Wildlight project, North Of Jacksonville, Florida and our Heartwood project South Of Savannah, Georgia. So for example, in Wildlight, we own 25,000 acres within a five mile radius and roughly 50,000 acres within a 10 mile radius of the epicenter of that project. So again, our strategy here is about creating a catalyst for value creation across a very large footprint of land.

Now let’s shift gears and talk about land based solutions. Slide 14 illustrates the global path to achieve net zero by 2,050 and what that’s going to require in terms of emissions reductions and carbon offsetting. Now the reality is, is the world is not currently on this path. And I think it’s fair to say that we don’t know exactly what this path will ultimately look like over the next twenty five years. But what we do know is that there’s significant global action underway to reduce carbon emissions.

Over 70% of countries and over 50% of the 2,000 largest global companies have made net zero commitments. And as a result, there’s a tremendous amount of capital being put to work today to decarbonize the economy and to increase the supply of renewable energy. So for example, between 2020 and 02/1930, utility solar capacity is projected to grow by seven times. Carbon capture and storage demand is projected to grow by 11 times. And voluntary carbon market issuance is projected to grow by six times.

So as a large owner of Timberlands, which also comprise a massive carbon sink, we believe these trends represent a very significant opportunity for our company. So when we talk about land based solutions, what exactly do we mean? Slide 15 provides an overview of how we broadly think about this business. So we generally think of land based solutions as falling into three categories. The first is alternative and additional land use.

That would include things like leasing our lands for solar farms or wind farms or leasing subsurface pore space for carbon capture and storage. The second category is carbon markets, and that would include compliance markets like the New Zealand emissions trading scheme that we participate in there, as well as voluntary markets where corporations are purchasing carbon offsets to meet their net zero claims. And that’s primarily what we’re dealing with here in The U. S. The third category is fiber for bioenergy and biofuels.

That will include things like using wood fiber for BECCS, which stands for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or using wood fiber for the manufacturing of biofuels, like sustainable aviation fuel or green methanol. Long term, we expect significant growth across all of these different categories of land based solutions. That said, we really see the most significant near term opportunity for Rayonier within solar and CCS. So let me spend a few minutes expanding on those opportunities. Slide 16 highlights the projected growth in utility solar development as well as the underlying land use map.

As you can see in the chart on the right here, we’re expecting 30 to 35 gigawatts of new utility solar capacity additions per year through 02/1930. Now in terms of land use math, each megawatt of generating capacity, of solar generating capacity, requires about seven acres of land. So this pace of solar development translates to an incremental land use need of over 200,000 acres per year or roughly 1,500,000 acres through 02/1930. So again, there’s a big opportunity here for large land owners like Rainier. Moving ahead to Slide 18, the chart on the right shows how our pipeline of solar options has grown over the past few years.

In 2021, we had only 7,000 acres under option for solar development. At year end 2024, that number had grown to 39,000 acres. So we feel really good about how this pipeline is developing. And as some of these options start converting into leases over the next few years, we expect that this is going to contribute to pretty significant cash flow growth. So now I’ll shift gears and talk about carbon capture and storage.

Slide 19 highlights the projected growth trajectory for CCS demand. As you can see, CCS demand in The U. S. Is projected to grow from about 25,000,000 tons today to over 300,000,000 tons over the next decade. Now of course, this is going to require a lot of suitable land and pore space, and that’s really the where the opportunity for Rainier is.

On Slide 20, we’ve outlined the three key considerations for cost effective CCS. So essentially you need three things for CCS to work. You need a concentrated source of high purity emissions that can be cost effectively captured. And thirdly, you need access to pipeline infrastructure to be able to move the captured carbon from point A to point B. And as you can see here, Rainier has significant ownership across our land base that checks these three boxes.

Initial interest in our land for CCS was primarily focused in Texas and Louisiana. But more recently, we’ve been encouraged to see that interest expand to Alabama and Georgia as well. So skipping ahead to Slide 22, here we show how our CCS leases have grown over the last couple of years. And this is something that we’re very encouraged by. So over the last two years, we’ve gone from having zero acres under CCS lease in 2022 to having over 150,000 acres at year end 2024.

So again, we’re very encouraged by the interest we’ve seen in our land base for carbon capture and storage. And like solar, we’re quite optimistic as to how this will translate into cash flow growth over time. Lastly, I’ll touch briefly on carbon markets. Voluntary carbon markets continue to grow at a pretty rapid pace and we expect that this will continue as we move towards 02/1930, which is a key milestone date for corporate net zero commitments. While we have not yet announced a carbon project, we are actively engaged on several potential pilot projects.

And so we do expect that voluntary carbon markets will be a key component of our growth strategy and land based solutions in the coming years. So let’s skip ahead to Slide ’28. I’ll touch briefly on some of the key results as it relates to our asset disposition program. November of twenty twenty three, we announced an asset disposition and capital structure realignment plan along with a $1,000,000,000 disposition target. There are really two key factors that drove us to this decision.

The first is that we wanted to reduce our target leverage from what had historically been a target of 4.5 times net debt to EBITDA to a new target of less than three times net debt to EBITDA. And that was certainly due to the higher interest rate environment prevailing at the time as well as today. Second, we felt as our stock was trading at a very significant discount to the private market intrinsic value of our assets, and we wanted to capture that arbitrage opportunity. Overall, we’ve been very pleased with the success of this program over the last fifteen or sixteen months. To date, we completed roughly $740,000,000 worth of dispositions at a weighted average EBITDA multiple of about 44 times.

And that’s roughly double our current trading multiple on timber only EBITDA. So we’ve captured a significant public private arbitrage year, and we’ve also generated significant CAD and NAV per share accretion in the process. Slides twenty nine and thirty provide some highlights with respect to our balance sheet and our credit profile following our dispositions. Year end 2024, our net debt to adjusted EBITDA was roughly 2.8 times and our net debt to enterprise value was about 17%. We currently have a weighted average cost of debt across our portfolio of 2.5%, which is 100% fixed, and we have a weighted average maturity of about four years.

So overall, we feel very good about how our balance sheet is positioned following the results we’ve been able to achieve on the disposition plan. And on that note, Anthony, I’m happy to open it up to some Q and A.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: Great. Mark, thank you for that very helpful overview. Maybe we can start off with land based solutions. You identified some financial targets around land based solutions, and I’m wondering if you could kind of share those with us. And then in terms of the activities that you outlined, solar, CCS, forest carbon, etcetera, how those may ultimately contribute to that target?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes, sure. So at our Investor Day in February of last year, we laid out long term targets for our Land Based Solutions business of our long term EBITDA targets of $30,000,000 in 2027 and seventy five million dollars in 02/1930. In terms of how that we anticipate that that will come together in terms of the different components of land based solutions, I think that that’s still yet to be determined. Each of those different land based solutions, I’d say, is progressing at its own pace. Certainly, at a very high level, as I noted earlier, we do expect that, really carbon capture and storage, solar and voluntary carbon markets are likely to be the largest components for us.

We think that there’s promise in bioenergy, but that’s probably longer dated in terms of the state of technological innovation there. So we do expect that all of those will contribute, but it remains to be seen kind of exactly what that mix looks like. We’ve been very encouraged by how the pipeline of opportunities has grown for us in both solar and CCS. Just to touch briefly on just some thoughts around that pipeline, recognize that when we had our Investor Day last year, we had laid out a year end target for solar options of 50,000 by year end. We landed at 39,000 at the end of the year, but an important factor that impacted that during the course of the year is that there were there was a new rule imposed by FERC, which is a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, around Q reform.

And so essentially what was happening is that the interconnection Q was getting clogged up with more speculative projects. And so there was Q reform and some rules implemented that essentially made it more difficult to put a project into the Q, where you had to demonstrate, the financial wherewithal of the developer, you had to post a fairly significant deposit, and it also put in place penalties to remove a project for from the Q. On balance, we think that all of these are positive developments because it’s making it more likely that to the extent that a project makes its way into the queue, it’s more likely to be developed. And so in our Investor Day last year, we laid out a targeted conversion rate of 25% to 40%. We now expect that that’s going to be towards the higher end of that, if not higher than that, given that a lot of the due diligence on these projects is now being done on the front end.

So you don’t have nearly as much speculation around solar projects or again companies putting land under option when they don’t really have the ability to complete the project. As it relates to carbon capture and storage, our pipeline there has grown quite a bit more than we had even anticipated a year ago. But recognize there’s a very protracted permitting process involved in bringing these projects to fruition. Certain of the lands that we have under CCS lease currently are much more approximate

Anthony Petneri, City Research: to existing infrastructure. Like I said, you need those three

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: factors, the confluence of those three Probably one of the most significant in terms of a gating item or a bottleneck is that pipeline capacity. So within our footprint in Texas and Louisiana, we’re adjacent to a number of large emitters, we’re adjacent to pipeline infrastructure and we have the geologic storage capacity. So those are going to be much more likely to be developed in the near term. Some of the opportunities that we’re looking at in Alabama and Georgia, some of that infrastructure still needs to be developed. And so those will be probably longer dated in nature.

But again, we think that both of those are going to contribute meaningfully to those long term targets, but it remains to be seen exactly what that mix looks like over the long term.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: Great, great. And we have a couple of questions. I’ll try to kind of merge them together. If solar and CCS are maybe the furthest along opportunities, You’ve talked a little bit about maybe the returns profile for some of these projects. But can you help us understand what some of these relationships actually look like or what like an illustrative project looks like in terms of length of time, who the counterparties are, how you manage risk, are you committing capital?

Just kind of help us understand maybe with a solar project and a CCS project, what they actually look like?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes. One of the key benefits as it relates to our role in the development of land based solutions is that we’re not today putting capital at risk. And so like I said, the two key opportunities that we’ve identified for us are solar storage. And within those opportunities that we’re evaluating, we’re really we’re solely acting as a lessor of land, in the case of solar and as a lessor of subsurface, poor space, pore space, rights as it relates to carbon capture and storage. And so we’re not actually investing in any type of infrastructure to facilitate these projects.

We’re solely acting as a land lessor and receiving a rental payment for that land. And so when we think about the return profile, we’re really thinking that this is pure upside opportunity in the sense that the only investment that we have in this business is the investment in the human capital and the personnel to really execute on these opportunities. And so like we talked about earlier that value lift and the cash flow lift and transitioning an acre from acre of Southern Timberland to an acre that’s under an operational CCS lease or an operational solar lease is really quite significant.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: And do you see any regulatory or sort of policy risk with the new administration on solar and CCS specifically?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: I mean, there’s certainly policy risk across both. I think the reliance on economic incentives between the two is quite different. I mean, even before the Inflation Reduction Act, solar was already on a pretty rapid growth trajectory. Utility solar has become very cost competitive with other forms of fossil fuel based electricity generation. And so while the Inflation Reduction Act and the incentives in the IRA certainly accelerated the growth of solar, I would say that was already on a pretty steep growth curve even before the IRA.

And we think that even without those IRA incentives, solar development would still occur at a pretty brisk pace. I’d say CCS is going to be more reliant on those incentives. By most accounts, the cost to conduct CCS from the capture technology to the storage is somewhere in the vicinity of $100 to $150 a ton. The current 45 Q incentive is $85 a ton. And so that’s a critical element of the viability of CCS, is having that IRA incentive in place.

Now, you recognize that these incentives to date haven’t been rolled back. I think the reality is, is there’s probably more bipartisan support for some of these IRA incentives than some of the political rhetoric would suggest. You recognize a lot of these IRA dollars have gone to Republican states or Republican districts and have created economic growth and jobs in those districts. And so again, I think that there is a fair amount of support for some of these incentives that are currently in place.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: Got it. Got it. And for some of the longer term opportunities, whether it’s forced carbon or biofuel, what are some of the things that need to happen either from like a regulatory perspective or technological perspective capabilities like for those to come to fruition?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes. Let me touch on those individually because they’re quite different. Nothing really needs to occur from a technological standpoint to support voluntary carbon markets. I think, what we needed there is just more standardization around the process and uniformity of credits. I think one of the challenges in the voluntary carbon markets has just been that there’s been a lot of junk credits out there and there hasn’t been great standardization of projects.

There certainly hasn’t been uniformity in pricing. You’ve seen some carbon credits trade at a few dollars a ton and you’ve seen some more technology based removal credits trade well in excess of $100 or even $200 a ton. And it’s hard to look at a market where there’s that type of pricing differential and think you’re getting the same type of offset quality at the lower end of that spectrum. And so I think what’s happened in the last few years is there has been a lot of effort underway to bring about greater, you know, greater, not regulatory necessarily, but just greater standardization across that space. And we have seen some convergence in carbon credit pricing and some lift in carbon credit pricing, particularly for forestry based offsets.

One of the things that limited us from getting into that business is you recognize that most of our lands are located in these high quality softwood timber baskets. And so it’s just a higher bar for us from a pricing standpoint, to want to manage those lands differently, for carbon offsetting. We really need to get to a point where the price of a forest based carbon offset was competitive with the price that we can realize for that timber in traditional timber markets. And we’ve certainly made a lot of progress on that front. I think the pricing that we’ve seen in some recent high quality forest offset projects has started to look more interesting relative to the market value of that timber in traditional markets.

And so like I said earlier, we are evaluating a number of pilot projects there and do expect to be active in that market longer term. As it relates to the bioenergy, there’s still a fair amount of technological evolution that needs to occur there. I’d say what’s probably furthest along is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. The technology certainly exists. It’s just a matter of aligning the getting the economic incentives to line up to where it’s actually financially viable to conduct that activity.

And similar with SAF and with green methanol, I mean, you can in fact make or manufacture biofuels from wood fiber, but it’s still fairly expensive to do so. And so I think we still need to see some cost competitiveness develop there, I think before we see that deployed at scale.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: Great, great. And one question we’ve received over the weekend, obviously, we had two executive orders, one on lumber, one on timber. You’re not a lumber producer, obviously. But from those executive orders, can you talk about direct or indirect impact that you’d anticipate for Rainier or the industry?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes, sure. So as it relates to the executive order around increasing harvesting on federal lands, which is I believe what you’re referencing. You recognize this is brand new in the last several days. So it’s still unclear exactly how this might play out. As we think about potential impacts, I’ll just offer a few observations.

First, there’s pretty limited federal ownership in The U. S. South. And so any potential impacts of this we think are largely going to be contained to the Pacific Northwest. Second, recognize that most of these federal lands have not been managed for commercial timber production in a very long time.

So you can’t just flip a switch and start harvesting on these lands. You need inventory data, you need road infrastructure, you need logging capacity. And the reality is that most of the mills that are currently in the system are not equipped to handle some of the larger piece sizes or some of the larger log diameters that exist on federal lands. That’s just going to be a practical constraint to actually ramping up that harvest. Lastly, they’re invariably going to be legal and regulatory obstacles to actually get to the point of implementing this order.

So when you put all this together, we don’t see this having a material impact on log markets, certainly not in the near term. And look, to the extent that the overarching objective here is to increase lumber production in The U. S. Over time that should certainly serve to benefit our industry longer term.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: And you talked about it a little bit, but maybe you can give us a little bit more context in terms of where your Timberwinds are in The U. S. South especially and sort of the mill customer set and how that’s positioned?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes. Our largest ownership is in the Southeast Georgia, Northeast Florida region. We also have significant land holdings in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. We have a traditional set of mill customers. I’d say overall, our mix in that Northeast Florida, Southeast Georgia area is a little bit more heavy to pulpwood.

We have a pretty robust pulp mill infrastructure in that region, whereas in the Southwest, it’s going to be a little bit more balanced between pulpwood and sawtimber. But across our entire Southern portfolio, our product mix is roughly 60% pulpwood and the balance sawtimber and obviously sawtimber is being sold into sawmills for solid wood products construction and our pulpwood product is being sold into pulp and paper mills as well as OSB facilities and some wood pellet facilities as well.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: We talked about land based solutions in some detail. I’m wondering just switching to real estate development. I think all the Timber REITs have something called real estate. But can you talk about how your business is different and how your footprint is different?

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes. So I’d say our business is different in the sense that we’ve gone a little bit further down that development value chain. We have these two active projects underway, Wildlight, North Of Jacksonville and Hartwood, South Of Savannah, Georgia. Clearly, those projects require some investment, again, in that horizontal infrastructure. And as a result of that, we achieved much higher price points on those improved development projects.

We’re now about nine, ten years into the inception of that Wildlight project North Of Jacksonville. And so I’d say we’re well through the period of time where more of that capital was upfront. We’re now kind of investing capital alongside relatively short turns on that capital land sales that are already lined up on the heels of those investments. And so we’ve increasingly tried to shift that model towards more of a capital light model or at least relatively quick turns of that capital. But the other portion of our business, the rural land sales business, that’s just a business that any owner of Timberland is in.

If you’re in the Timberland business, you’re invariably in the land sales business as well because some portion of your lands are always going to be more valuable to somebody else than they’re worth to us as Timberlands. And so again, that’s the business where we’re routinely selling 1% to 2% of our land base annually in the South at these premiums that have moved up pretty significantly over time in excess of 100% above Timberland value in the last several years. And so that’s a business that we continue to focus on. I think we’ve demonstrated that we can realize very strong price points on our lands. Again, part of that is just driven by where our lands are located.

We have a very robust rural HBU business in Florida as well as Texas. And in terms of, again, where our lands are located, I think we’re in some very attractive HBU markets relative to the peers. And I think that that’s demonstrated through the premiums we’ve been able to achieve. Great.

Anthony Petneri, City Research: We’re kind of coming up on the shot clock, but you talked about the asset improvement program, which is largely completed and you’ve deleveraged. Just in kind of our last minute, can you talk about kind of going forward, how you see capital allocation growth? Just sum it up first.

Mark McHugh, CEO, Rayonier: Yes. So our mantra around capital allocation has always been to be nimble and opportunistic with a view towards building long term value per share. And I think that we’ve absolutely executed this asset disposition program with that in mind. As it relates to that program, you recognize we set out a $1,000,000,000 target over eighteen months that was back in November of twenty twenty three. We’re now about three quarters of the way through that target.

We are still evaluating other opportunities to complete our original target. We said publicly that we are evaluating strategic alternatives around our New Zealand portfolio. And so again, we do still think that there is an opportunity here, particularly with respect to that disconnect that continues to persist between the private market value of our assets and where the stock price is trading. So we do think that there’s an opportunity to continue to execute there and to generate incremental CAD and NAV accretion.

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