Weyerhaeuser Co. is selling almost all of its timberland in Clatsop County to an entity affiliated with The Campbell Group LLC, a Portland-based timberland investment company.

It’s also seeking buyers for five tracts of land along the southwest Washington coast.

On Thursday, the company announced the sale of about 140,000 acres in Clatsop County for about $300 million, as well as plans to talk with potential buyers about selling up to 82,000 acres in five tracts in Washington.

Altogether, the land in question represents about 10 percent of Weyerhaeuser’s holdings in the Pacific Northwest, the company reported. It will still own and manage about 6 million acres of timber nationwide, about 1 million of which are in Oregon.

The land sale is expected to close this month, shifting management of about a quarter of Clatsop County’s total acreage from a timber company to an investment firm. The Campbell Group manages 2.85 million acres and $5.3 billion in timberland assets.

Weyerhaeuser spokesman Greg Miller said the land sale does not include the company’s Warrenton sawmill, which currently employs 93 people, or the acreage near Seaside and Cannon Beach that may be used in relocating schools out of the tsunami inundation zone. But the sale will affect 11 employees in Weyerhaeuser’s Seaside office.

“My understanding is that The Campbell Group will be talking to those folks as they work through the transition,” Miller said. “The sawmill will have to source its logs on the open market, but it’s a competitive sawmill.”

No one at The Campbell Group office in Portland was able to speak with The?Daily Astorian Friday morning.

Miller said Weyerhaeuser decided to sell the Clatsop County timber tracts because the company has a competitive advantage in growing and processing Douglas fir, and the timberland on the North?Coast is largely made up of hemlock and spruce.

“These are what we would consider nonstrategic acreage,”?he said. “Most of the land sold is high quality land. It’s very productive land but the stands are predominantly hemlock and spruce. That was the rationale. It more or less represents strategic rebalancing of our timberlands.”

Miller also said the sale “represents Weyerhaeuser’s continued focus on improving financial flexibility and liquidity.”

The Clatsop County land sale should contribute about $100 million after taxes to Weyerhaeuser’s third-quarter earnings at a time when the company has been trimming costs, shutting mills and selling assets to cope with the slumping housing market and plummeting demand for lumber.

Weyerhaeuser’s second-quarter earnings fell from $102 million last year to $71 million this year. Much of the latest quarter’s profit stemmed from a $34 million sale of non-strategic land, primarily in the southwest Washington state area.

Jim Geisinger, vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers, said the land sale in Clatsop County might not affect local logging companies that do contract work on Weyerhaeuser land. The?Campbell Group generally has a good reputation as a timberland manager, he said, though it remains to be seen how the company will manage its new holdings.

“The Campbell Group owns a lot of land in the Northwest, and from what we can tell they’re good land managers,”?he said. “It hasn’t had that track record of subdividing and developing timberland. If that holds true in this case, that would would be good.”

But it’s too early to tell whether that will be the case, he said.

“Depending on what the expectations of those investors are, there could be more timber harvested, or there could be less timber harvested.”