Oddball Stocks Newsletter Excerpt - Pardee Resources Company (Issue 38)

This is an excerpt from our Company Updates in Oddball Stocks Newsletter Issue 38 (January 2022): 

At the end of 2021, Pardee declared a nice special dividend of $15 per share, which was in addition to $7.20 of quarterly dividends during the year. (We are waiting by the mailbox to see how much more money Pardee made during the fourth quarter from metallurgical coal royalties.) Thinking about Keweenaw's sale of land, and doing the analysis for the Dorchester Minerals update in this Issue, got us to thinking about how Pardee's timber acreage per share has changed over time.

At the end of 2002, Pardee had 770,196 shares outstanding. They had not yet bought their 44,000 acre “Powellton” timber tract in West Virginia (for which they paid $18 million in 2003), so their timber holdings must have been about 156,000 acres, or 0.2 acres per share. It also had a book value of $36 million, paid a total of $1.78 in dividends that year, and had $4.7 million of outstanding preferred stock at liquidation value. The shares traded for about 1.5x book value.

In the third quarter of 2021, Pardee had 656,993 shares outstanding and owns 161,225 acres of land. Their holdings have grown to a quarter of an acre per share, or about 20% per share increase, during a period of 20 years – thanks to share buybacks. Meanwhile, Pardee's book value increased by 4.3x to $155 million, it paid $22.20 of dividends last year, and trades for only 90% of book value.