Northwest Rural Properties

Oct 2013

I know this sounds a little over the top, but these guys are the best service company of any kind I have ever done business with. My wife and I own about 80 acres of forest land which we have owned for many years. During that time we worked with several different foresters to get advice about managing the property. They were all fine, but we never really got a feeling we had an expert partner helping us with the property. That all changed when we brought in Luke Machtolf of Northwest Management. We sat down together and talked about what we wanted to do with the property. We then paid them to prepare a management plan which turned out to be a detailed, professional study of our property which explained in lay terms what we had, what the problems were, and what their recommendations were on how to get where we had said we wanted to be. This recommendation was substantially different than what we had received from our prior forester and was fully supported in the plan. Luke also showed us on the ground what he was talking about in the plan. We then hired NMI to do a cruise of the property, which resulted in a detailed estimate of both the volume of timber on the property and a detailed summary of what we could likely sell the timber for if we followed their recommendation, what our logging and related costs would be, what our reforestation and other costs would be, and what we would net from the project. We took Luke's advice on how to proceed and Luke then brought in a logger (see related review for Rich Richmond Logging in Chewelah) who did just an outstanding job. Luke supervised that project and held our hands the whole way as we worked through a number of different issues that came up (mostly neighbor issues) during the course of the project. NMI administered the financial end of the project and provided us with readable periodic reports showing the timber sale proceeds, payment of the logger and other expenses, and our net proceeds. All of this was done very timely and exactly as promised. At the end of the project the financial projections were perfectly in line with the estimates Luke had given us many months before. We view Luke and NMI as our long term partners as we continue to manage this property over the next decades and we just could not be happier with their work or the outcome. We were stunned to see how much better the property looked, even though we ended up taking off far more trees than we would have ever expected to harvest. Great financial results and an improvement to the property both now, and in the future as we grow stronger, disease resistant trees which are better suited to the property. If you are looking for someone to work with you to manage your forest land these are the guys you want.