News & Blog

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News. Trends. Helpful tips. Personal stories. If it’s about the recreational lifestyle – hunting, fishing, camping – anything outdoors, we’ll share it. Have a story to share with us? Recently purchased a PotlatchDeltic property? Just bagged the buck that you’ve been watching all season? We’d love to share your stories too. Email us

As you determine the value of a recreational property you’re thinking of buying, understanding the soils on the property is extremely important.

Delineating a property’s different types of soil is an important part of developing a solid timber management plan, because some trees grow better in more sandy soil, while other types of trees do better in other types of soils.

And healthy trees and underbrush play an important role in helping wildlife thrive – a key factor in driving the value of a quality recreational property. As just one example, acorns from oak trees supply a good food source for deer.

So how do you figure out the types of soil on a property? Perhaps the best online mapping source is a mapping website run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that’s based on the department’s surveys of properties around the country.

“The USDA soil map website is the best one we’ve found in terms of quality and accuracy of soils information,” says Rod Osterloh of Close-Converse in Brainerd, Minnesota, a member of the PotlatchDeltic Preferred Broker network. “It’s important to get the right information on soils, because that could impact everything from an area’s potential to hold water to how you will be able to access a property.”

To use the USDA mapping website, an effective way to find a certain property is to use its latitude and longitude, since the USDA site doesn’t index properties by parcel. The information in the USDA maps doesn’t go out of date quickly, Osterloh says, with a shelf life of 20 to 30 years.

The real estate expert helping a buyer needs to know how to interpret the USDA maps, how to understand what the soils are and how the soils impact the quality of the property. So it’s critical that a recreational land buyer work with someone who knows rural property sales.

The experts in the PotlatchDeltic Preferred Broker network fit the bill, with deep experience in understanding everything that goes into a recreational property’s value, whether it’s the soils, the timber or the wildlife. Contact one of our experts today to get the buying process started.