Forest Products Pricing and Consulting Firm Forest2Market Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Peter J. Stewart founded the company in January of 2000 with the introduction of an innovative standing timber pricing service. Based on actual timber sales contracts, the pricing service was the first non-survey source of pricing information in the industry. This service soon became the industry standard. Other innovations followed. They include custom resource availability and pricing studies, timber price forecasts and delivered price benchmarks. The Delivered Price Benchmark Service currently represents 80 percent of the market in the South, over 200 million tons of timber annually. This service is also available in the Pacific Northwest.

Forest2Market begins its second decade with two additional innovations. One, a wood fuel indexing service, allows bioenergy and utility companies to manage price risk associated with their wood raw material supply. The most recent addition has been a lumber price service, which is based on actual orders and invoices from both lumber buyers and sellers.

To a large degree, Forest2Market’s success can be traced to its obsession with real data. “While the forest products industry’s annual revenues are more than $65 billion,” said Stewart, “the industry itself remains highly fragmented and lacks the critical business information it needs to operate effectively and efficiently. I spent the first decade of my career buying or selling timber and timberland without reliable data on its value. The idea for Forest2Market originated there, and we have been offering solutions to industry participants built on real market data ever since. To this day, every business solution we develop, every piece of industry information or analysis we provide to our clients is based on transaction-level data and a commitment to provide our clients with accurate and actionable business information.”