Property estimation, landowner perspectives and timber valuation of heirs property in North Carolina

Heirs’ property ownership and its associated challenges continues to be a persistent problem despite efforts to prevent, educate and remediate heirs’ property ownership throughout the south. It continues to be a mechanism for land loss and continue fragmentation of forested land. While there have been many efforts to create a metrics to assess the size, and scope of heirs’ property in the United States, there have been few or no known efforts to make an accurate assessment of the value of heir's property for timber, water quality, wildlife, biodiversity, and its role in defining community character and a host of other benefits. This paper provides a starting point with some consideration of these resources beginning with locked up timber value in North Carolina classified as heirs’ property. While most study of heir's property explores issues from a social justice standpoint, this paper explores the economic impact to an essential forest industry. Few studies have been done on the cohort of heir's property owners to examine their perspectives and challenges associated with this particularly vulnerable form of land ownership. This paper will also give a brief examination of recent survey research of heir's property owners. This paper examines North Carolina as a first case study that can be learned from, improved on and refined to apply to other states to better understand the values and/or lost opportunities from land being held in heirs’ property status.