EAGLESTAR.NET LAND AND PROPERTY REVIEW
http://www.eaglestar.net
Issue #33
September 8, 2008

IN THIS ISSUE:
Properties of the Week:
- Lake Properties
Site News: New Search Engine!
Real Estate Roundup:
- Invest in Timber without Owning an Acre
Sponsor's Corner:
- Lakefront Lot, Dandridge, TN
Buyers List Update:
- Lake Properties Wanted
Auction News:
- Farm Land and Acreage, Russell County, KY
- 3 Beautiful Home Sites, Napa Valley, CA
LandTerms.com Term of the Week: Lake


"I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core."
- from 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'
- William Butler Yeats (Irish poet, b. 1865 - d. 1939)


PROPERTIES OF THE WEEK: Lake Properties
Gated Community Lakefront Home Sites
Jacksonville, Duval County, Florida
Listing ID: 20992
One acre (+/-) lot in Jacksonville Ranch Club, a beautiful estate-sized
lakefront home site. Enjoy gorgeous views and wildlife, too in this private,
gated Florida community. Jacksonville Ranch Club features 200 acre of natural
preserves, nine stocked lakes for fishing and boating, twelve miles of bridle
trails, and privacy lots to accommodate horses. Residents can choose from
lakefront properties or lush wooded home sites. A 25 minute drive from the
culturally rich city of Jacksonville, with Jacksonville International Airport
even closer. Priced below market value. Browse photos and additional
information at http://www.eaglestar.net/dgd.html.

Colorado Lakefront Property, 280 Acres
Walden, Jackson County, Colorado
Listing ID: 21078
This beautiful 280+/- acre parcel features exclusive recreational and fishing
rights to Meadow Creek Reservoir, the second largest privately-owned lake in
Colorado. This is a 254-acre stocked trout lake, which borders Johnnie Moore
Mountain, a Wildlife Management Area open to the public which offers permitted
hunting. Located only 70 miles from Steamboat Springs and world-renowned
skiing and snowboarding. Owner also has an additional 480 acres available and
will consider owner financing. Photos and more details are available at
http://www.eaglestar.net/jrbck2-.html.

154 Acre Lakefront Property in Wisconsin
Chaseburg, Vernon County, Wisconsin
Listing ID: 21069
Exceptional acreage at end of dead-end road with dramatic views, old forest,
and frontage on Runge Hollow Lake. Beautiful building sites, great hunting,
very private. This 154+/- acre property in scenic southwest Wisconsin is close
to the Mississippi River and the city of La Crosse, WI. Your choice of
fabulous building sites on a high ridge-top with easy road access, electric to
site, and absolutely breathtaking views in all seasons. View photos and
additional information at http://www.eaglestar.net/crw.html.

Browse over 90 properties with lake frontage, lake access, lake views, or even
their own private lakes at
http://www.eaglestar.net/Properties/Lake_Properties/index.html.


SITE NEWS: New Search Engine
At American Eagle Star, we are always looking for ways to improve our web sites
and make them more user-friendly. To this end, we have added a new search
engine to both EagleStar.net and LandTerms.com. This feature is easier to use,
returns better results, and greatly expands the search capabilities and options
on both sites. On Eaglestar.net, the new search feature can be accessed using
the EagleStar Land Search field that appears at the top of each page. We have
also left the previous search function intact in order to provide a variety of
search options and for those that may prefer it. The two search engines
function in different ways, and the old engine may be useful for certain types
of searches. You can access the previous search option by clicking on the
"Search" link that appears on the red navigation bar at the top of each page.

On Landterms.com, the new search can be accessed by using the "Power Search"
field at the top of each page. We have also added an "Advanced Power Search"
feature that allows users to fine-tune their search queries. The "Advanced
Power Search", as well as the previous search function (now labeled "Optional
Search Form") can both be found by clicking on the "Search" button on the
yellow navigation bar at the top of each page. We are pleased with the
organized, relevant search results returned by our new engine on both sites and
encourage all our site users to try it out - let us know what you think!


REAL ESTATE ROUNDUP - Finance and Investment, Timber Management
Timber REITs: Investing in Timber without Owning an Acre
Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs, are a group form of real estate
investment that own and manage commercial or other income-producing properties
such as shopping centers, residential rental real estate, office buildings,
warehouses, and now, timberland. In the 20th century, industrial ownership of
timber-producing forest lands has ranged between 9% and 17% of all timberlands
in the United States. Industrial ownership in the past has implied that a
tract of timberland was owned by a large forest products supplier or
manufacturer and intensively managed for wood volume production. Since about
1999, however, there has been a dramatic change in thinking about the best way
to own and manage these lands. The previously held belief can best be
summarized as "the more, the better" - it was thought that holding large tracts
of timberland was the only way for industrial owners to remain competitive in
an increasingly global marketplace. Recent trends have shown this idea to be
false, and within the past 10 years vast acreages of timberlands have been
divested. As an example, between 2000 and 2004 more than 23 million acres of
timberland changed hands.

As a result of these divestments, many large forest products companies are no
longer majority owners of large tracts of timberland. Some of these well-known
names include Boise Cascade, Crown Zellerbach, Georgia-Pacific, International
Paper, Scott Paper, and Stone Container Corporation. At the beginning of this
trend, large investment organizations known as TIMO's (timberland investment
management organizations) were formed to purchase large portions of the
divested acreage. TIMO's generally take the form of C-corporations, the
traditional way that large businesses and investment groups are organized. It
soon became apparent, however, that TIMO's structured as C-corporations
(C-corps) were at a direct tax disadvantage to other forms of land and business
ownership, such as limited liability corporations (LLCs), S-corporations
(S-corps), and especially real estate investment trusts (REITs).

REITs must meet certain requirements in order to be considered as such by the
IRS, including having shares in the organization that are fully transferable,
having at least 100 shareholders, and paying those shareholders a minimum of
90% of taxable income as dividends. The tax difference between a traditional
C-corp and a REIT is that C-corps are basically subject to double taxation,
paying federal corporate income taxes as well as federal and state income taxes
paid by shareholders, with both corporate and personal taxes paid on the same
income. As long as they continue to meet the requirements, however, REITs are
permitted to deduct payments made to shareholders as dividends from their
corporate income tax, which usually means they pay no corporate income tax at
all. REIT shareholders must still pay income taxes on dividends and capital
gains.

Since 1999, four large forest product corporations have restructured as REITs,
in response to economic pressures and shareholder insistence that timberlands
have historically been an undervalued and therefore under-performing corporate
asset. These companies are Longview Fiber, with timberland in Washington and
Oregon; Plum Creek, with holdings in 18 states; Potlatch, with land in
Arkansas, Idaho, Minnesota, and Oregon, and Rayonier, which has holdings
throughout the United States. Together, these REITs own and manage nearly 12.5
million acres of timberland in the United States.

Recent changes to the four timber REITs include Brookfield Asset Management's
(BAM) purchase of Longview Fiber in 2007, which took the publicly-traded REIT
private; Longview Fiber no longer functions as a REIT but as a wholly owned
subsidiary of BAM. Another recent development, finalized just last week, is
the joint venture between Plum Creek and The Campbell Group LLC, which allowed
Plum Creek to capture the value of over 450,000 acres of timberland in
Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
This transaction added to the value, earnings, and cash flow of Plum Creek and
did not affect its status as a timberland REIT. The business press has also
been reporting for the past two years that Weyerhaeuser is considering
restructuring itself as a REIT, but several obstacles remain, including
lower-than-projected revenues, a large amount of debt, the question of how to
divest itself of its milling and manufacturing facilities, and the ability to
prove to the IRS that the restructuring would be for legitimate business
purposes other than mere tax avoidance.

The restructuring of former forest products firms into REITs opens the door to
small investors wishing to invest in timber, who generally do not have the
large amounts of capital required to invest either directly in timberlands or
through a TIMO. The idea is relatively simple: since REITs are publicly
traded, investors now have the opportunity to purchase stocks in companies that
focus on growing and selling timber. While some forest product companies have
been publicly traded for years, timber REITs offer distinct financial and tax
advantages over these firms, many of which have struggled with massive debts
and poor cash flow during the past few decades. One caveat is that timber
REITs often generate revenue primarily through milling and manufacturing rather
than direct sales of timber, and so are better suited to those seeking forest
products investments rather than a return on timber sales alone.

The announcements of the conversion of four major timber companies to timber
REITs were accompanied by significant increases in the stock price of each.
Overall investor response to timberlands structured as REITs has been very
positive, with many investors expressing a preference for timber REITs over
traditional timber or forest product C-corps. This makes sense given that
these types of investments are both highly liquid and tax-efficient. Timber
REIT investors are also more likely to realize higher returns due to greater
access to revenue generated from managing timberland, in combination with lower
overall taxes.

In the past, forest products corporations in the United States that owned vast
amounts of timberlands had a direct stake in the ecological well-being of these
areas. After all, an unhealthy forest produces low volumes of poor-quality
wood and other products. Timber REITs, therefore, may offer positive outcomes
not only financially, but ecologically as well, because it is more likely that
they will preserve timberlands in a healthy, productive state that not only
generates profits from the trees that are grown there, but provides desirable
and necessary features such as wildlife habitat. Over the past 15 to 20 years,
conservation groups, hunting and outdoor recreation organizations, land
managers, and forest scientists have decried the loss of responsible
stewardship over vast amounts of productive timberland to planned communities,
ranchettes, shopping centers, or other development as forest products firms
turn to land divestment as they seek to unlock the full value of their land
assets.

This does not mean that timberlands owned by timber REITs will not be developed
for residential or commercial use. After all, the RE in REIT stands for real
estate, and it is naive to think that these companies will be able to provide
returns for investors in contemporary markets from timber management alone. As
one might expect, development of timberland by REITs is not without its
controversies. For example, county officials and conservation groups in
Montana have recently voiced concern over plans by Plum Creek to convert some
of its private inholdings in national forests from timberland to residential
subdivisions. Whatever the outcome of this case, development of private
timberlands by REITs is almost sure to continue: in 2007, Plum Creek earned
approximately 25% of its total revenues through direct sales or development of
timberlands.

Today's economic reality is that many timberlands will eventually be sold for
development. Some former timber companies that did not restructure as REITs
have sold their timber holdings outright to developers. Given the fact that it
has become increasingly difficult to make a profit on logging or forest
products manufacturing, timber REITs can be viewed as at least slowing the
negative impacts of development on the environment, because they are still
holding on to millions of acres of timber which are unlikely to be developed,
at least in the near future. Former timber companies that have restructured as
REITs are still largely acting as responsible stewards of these timberlands.
Timber REITs also allow small investors the chance to earn returns in this
economic sector, which was previously difficult if not impossible. In
addition, the tax structure of REITs offers direct advantages to shareholders
over other organizational options. For these reasons, timber REITs are seen by
many as a generally positive trend, both ecologically and financially.

For our subscribers who would like to check out the timber REITs, we have
included their ticker symbols, this morning's stock prices, and their Yahoo
Finance company profile web addresses below:
Plum Creek Timber Co. Inc., ticker PCL, $49.45/share (up $0.93)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=PCL

Potlatch Corp., ticker PCH, $48.19/share (up $1.23)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=pch

Rayonier Inc., ticker RYN, $45.12/share (up $1.05)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ryn

The following web pages offer more information on the topic of timber REITs,
from a variety of viewpoints:
http://www.forisk.com/UserFiles/File/Qtr%2001Q07news.pdf
("Introduction to Timber REITs") - this is a PDF file, Adobe Reader required to
open

http://thetimberlandblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/timos-and-reits.html
("TIMOs and REITs")

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080827006006&newsLang=en
("Plum Creek Timber Company, Inc. Captures the Value of 454,000 Acres of
Southern Timberland")

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004449276_weyco31.html
("No Weyerhaeuser REIT Soon")

http://www.hcn.org/issues/372/17746
("Easing into Development")


SPONSOR'S CORNER
The Land and Property Review would like to thank this week's sponsor, Angela
Privett at Arrowhead Real Estate, Kodak, Tennessee. Angela is a Tennessee lake
property specialist, featuring outstanding real estate such as:

Home Site on Douglas Lake
Dandridge, Jefferson County, Tennessee
Listing ID: 20590
Lakefront lot on beautiful Douglas Lake, Jefferson County, TN. Located in a
very desirable community close to the gateway of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Enjoy being on the water and seeing the views. This lot is priced to sell.
View photo and contact information at http://www.eaglestar.net/fmr21-.html.

See all of Angela Privett's properties on EagleStar.net at
http://www.eaglestar.net/Properties/Multiple_Listings/Angela_Privett_Treadway/index.html.


BUYERS LIST UPDATE
http://www.eaglestar.net/Land_Buyers_List/index.html
Find the properties you are looking for by placing unlimited free buyer's ads
on Eaglestar.net. This service is intended for serious inquiries only. It's
fast, easy, and best of all, free. Navigate to
http://www.eaglestar.net/pages/buyers.html to begin.

Wanted: Lake Access, Small River in California
Seeking 20+ acres of recreational land with access to water sufficient for
fishing. Can be a year-round creek, but small rivers are preferable.
Hopefully wooded, terrain does not need to be level. Mountains preferable.
Will be willing to pay significantly more for even a little bit (dock-sized)
access to a nearby lake. Please refer to buyer #20825.

Wanted: Property near Klamath Falls or Grants Pass
Looking for 5-20 acres of wooded property close to a lake. Utilities close
would be nice, but not necessary. Please refer to buyer #19981.

Looking in: Caribou/Chilcotin, British Columbia
Looking for 3+ acres with or without a house in the Chilcotin/Caribou area,
preferably between Williams Lake and Nimpo Lake, BC. Please refer to buyer
#19815.

Looking in: Northern California
Camp Ramah in California, a Jewish summer camp, is looking for a site to serve
a minimum of 550 people at any one time (400 campers, 150 staff). An existing
camp, retreat or land to develop the campground facilities will be considered.
Desired site characteristics are: Within approximately two hours from the Bay
Area
100 plus acres total (40 acres buildable)
Lake or reservoir for recreation
Camp environment (privacy, trees, adjacent open space, etc.)
Please refer to listing ID #19580.

Looking in: Anywhere, USA
Seeking recreational land with a creek, or on a river or lake. Privacy and
close to mountains, prefer where there are no rattlesnakes. Please refer to
buyer #19575.

Looking in: Eastern PA, Northern MD, or DE
20 or more acres with a swimming pond or lake (lake access). Eastern
Pennsylvania, northern Maryland, or Delaware. 2 1/2 Hours from Washington DC
and New York. Please refer to buyer #19569.

Wanted: Western Washington land with water, electricity, cleared, lake, and
gated. Please refer to buyer #19446.

Looking in: Eastern Tennessee
Looking for 40-120 acres for campground development. Mountain views,
creek/river on property a plus. Also 10-20 acre pond/lake. Bordering
state/federal land with public use would be big bonus. Easy access to
interstate system. Relaxed zoning to enable construction of buildings, cabins,
RV spaces. Please refer to buyer #19420.

Wanted: 100+ acres, Tennessee or north Georgia. Secluded and set back from the
main road. Creek, lake or pond. Some pastureland for sheep and/or cattle.
Good site for building a home. Close enough to a city or town to buy groceries
and see a doctor, but not so close it's in the backyard. Please refer to buyer
#19399.

Looking in: Eastern Texas, preferably Tyler or Carthage area.
50+ acres with creek, pond, or lake in Texas. Locations really not important,
just think wet and warm. I will have about $250,000, possibly cash for the
right place. Please refer to buyer #18983.

Looking in: Kentucky, preferably Hancock, Henderson, McLean, western
Breckinridge or northern Ohio Counties
Private party wants 90-300 acres in Kentucky, with the majority in hardwood
forest with water (creek, stream, river, pond, lake). Good hunting land with a
pole barn or out-buildings a plus. Please refer to buyer #18931.

Looking in: Missouri in or near Galena, Kimberling City, Cape Fair or Branson
Waterfront or water view property wanted on Table Rock Lake in Southern
Missouri. Prefer 10 or more acres. Please refer to buyer #18734.

See all 'Lake Properties Wanted' ads at
http://www.eaglestar.net/cgi-bin/db/search.cgi?catid=165&query=lake&search=Go.


AUCTION NEWS - http://www.eaglestar.net/Land_Auction_Calendar/index.html
Farm Land and Raw Acreage, 8 Tracts, 111 Acres
Russell Springs, Russell County, Kentucky
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Listing ID: 21081
Absolute auction, 8 parcels, 111+/- total acres, possibility of some
combinations of parcels. These tracts feature beautiful acreage close to town,
seldom offered in Russell County, KY. Mostly flat and gently rolling fertile
farm land; most tracts feature a small wooded area along the back or edge of
the tract. Some tracts have scenic views overlooking beautiful Caney Creek
Gorge. New road provides easy access to some parcels. One tract has barns and
a modular home. Modest property restrictions apply. Grain bin and silo to be
auctioned separately. Photos and contact information are available at
http://www.eaglestar.net/Detailed/21081.html.

Absolute Auction, 3 Home Sites, Napa Valley
Saint Helena - Calistoga Valley, California
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Listing ID: 21052
Three spectacular home sites with views of the Napa Valley vineyards and Mount
St. Helena, located in the coveted and prestigious Saint Helena - Calistoga
Valley. These home sites range from 0.42+/- to 1.08+/- acres and are being
offered at absolute auction - selling regardless of price. The views are
staggering, and plans have already been designed to maximize the surrounding
vistas. The current owner has already taken many of the steps necessary to
build on these lots, including perc tests, soil reports and environmental
reports. The surrounding community is home to more than 300 wineries as well as
well as dozens of attractions that draw more than 5 million visitors each year.
Visit the listing web page for photos and additional information.
http://www.eaglestar.net/Detailed/21052.html


LANDTERMS.COM TERM OF THE WEEK
http://landterms.com
Each issue we feature a real estate, forestry, natural sciences or other
land-related term from our partner site, LandTerms.com.

This week's term: Lake
An inland body of water, generally of considerable size, that collects and
stores usually fresh water from surface runoff, and where there is little or no
horizontal movement of the impounded water. Lakes can be formed by volcanic,
human, or glacial activity; by mass wasting such as landslides; or by stream
channel abandonment such as may occur with old, meandering rivers (an "oxbow"
lake).

Browse all categories of real estate, natural resources, and other land-related
terms at http://landterms.com/categories.html.


SUGGESTIONS
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Email: newsletter@eaglestar.net

ARCHIVES
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http://eaglestar.net/newsletter.

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