Latvian state TV ran a simple test: the same 10 ha parcel in Vidzeme drew offers from €30,000 to €80,000. The 2.7× gap is the price an owner pays for entering negotiations without numbers.
The experiment
Latvian state television (LTV) ran a simple test in 2025: the same 10 ha private forest parcel in Vidzeme was shown to three different buyers at the same time. The three responses came back at €30,000, €50,000 and €80,000. The highest bid was 2.7 times the lowest — for a property where not a single square metre or cubic metre of timber had changed.
Latio and Tribus transaction data put roughly 50% of Latvian forest sales below the market median, with sellers receiving on average about 64% of the value a fully competitive process could produce. The LTV experiment makes that statistic concrete on a single deal.
Why three prices for one forest
The spread is not random. Three buyers looked at the same property with three different layers of information in hand.
The first relied on a visual walk-through and ignored the VMD inventory data. The second applied a regional average without adjusting for the specific stand. The third had already worked through a full timber stock analysis — basal area 26 m²/ha, dominant height 24 m, pine with 70% merchantable assortment and an existing extraction road — totalling roughly 1,800–2,000 m³ of standing timber. Only the third bid reflects what the forest is actually worth on the stump.
The mechanics are the same as in any market where one side knows more than the other: a buyer who models the deal before the meeting can price the gap between the seller's knowledge and his own directly into the offer.
What the buyer knows before the meeting
A commercial buyer typically arrives at the conversation after most of the analysis is already done. The specific VMD field data (G, H, d10, s10) has been pulled from public sources. Harvest windows by rotation age have been worked out in his own spreadsheet. The assortment mix — sawlog, pallet timber, chips — has been derived from stand parameters and regional demand. Haulage distance and logistics costs are estimated in kilometres, not in "about right".
None of this is privileged information. VMD inventory data is public; interpreting it is a matter of time and method. But an owner who walks into negotiations without that calculation is selling the buyer's information, not the value of the forest.
What to prepare before the first offer
To keep the spread from working against the seller, four pieces of information about the property should be on the table before the first conversation with a buyer.
- Dominant species and age — read directly from the s10 and a10 fields in the VMD inventory.
- An approximate standing volume in m³, calculated from the G×H×f approach (covered in detail in a separate article).
- How many compartments have already reached the regulatory rotation age — the MezaData calculator flags this automatically.
- Access to the property — an existing forest road raises transaction prices by 10–20%, and that detail belongs in the conversation from the start.
With those four numbers on the table, the first bid is no longer a probe. It becomes a question the seller can answer in his own figures.