Waiting to Cherry-Pick Plum Creek

For better or worse, the shares of timber real estate investment trust Plum Creek Timber (NYSE: PCL) have gone almost nowhere in the nine months since I last wrote on this company for The Motley Fool. Of course, shareholders aren't exactly completely down in the dumps about that: They've continued to collect a nice tax-advantaged dividend along the way.

Looking at the first-quarter earnings report, I see few surprises. Pricing conditions have gotten a little tougher in the South; the combination of lower realized prices and deferred harvests led to a revenue increase of less than 4%, and a 10% or so drop in net income (after adjusting for items in both quarters).

Results were relatively stronger in Plum Creek Timber's Northern Resources segment, with harvest volume up 35% and operating profit up 21%. However, a lot of that increased harvest came from recently acquired timberlands, so it's not exactly apples-to-apples (or pine-to-pine, if you prefer). In the South, profits were down more than 20% as harvest volume declined, partly because of the company's decision to defer harvests and avoid selling into an oversupplied market.

That's part of what I really like about the long-term potential of this story. When you're in the business of selling trees, you can always just wait a bit if you don't like the prices you're seeing today. Sure, there are some costs involved in waiting, and there is a point of diminishing returns for tree growth, but there's still no heavy pressure to harvest immediately and take whatever price the market offers.

This is still one of my favorite long-term resource-oriented investment ideas. Not only is Plum Creek a good operator of its timberlands, it's also getting more active in real estate sales -- identifying lands that may be more lucrative if sold for residential real estate than kept as timberland.

Unfortunately, like another of my favorite resource ideas (Penn Virginia (NYSE: PVR)), the prices of these shares just aren't that compelling today. For now, I'm thinking that the better place to be in forest products is with the containerboard/packaging folks like Packaging Corp (NYSE: PKG), Smurfit-Stone (Nasdaq: SSCC), and Rock-Tenn (NYSE: RKT) -- but knock 10% off of today's Plum Creek price, and I might change my tune.

For more Foolish thoughts on forestry:

• Watching Trees Grow
• Weyerhauser: Doing More With Less
• Deltic Timber Axes Cash Flow

Fool contributor Stephen Simpson has no financial interest in any stocks mentioned (that means he's neither long nor short the shares).