Washington DNR Timber Sales Scraper

Turns the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) timber-auction pages into clean, structured JSON you can filter, export, or poll on a schedule. One run gives you every sale currently listed as upcoming, every sale offered in the previous twelve months, every unsold sale available at minimum value, and the Good Neighbor Authority results table, each with auction date, county, DNR region, agreement number, FSC/SFI certification flags, volume (MBF), minimum appraised value, computed USD per MBF, and a direct link to the sale packet PDF.

DNR auctions state trust-land timber roughly once a month, by region. Loggers, sawmills, log exporters, timber brokers, forestry consultants and lenders watch these pages to plan bids and track stumpage prices. This Actor replaces re-reading the pages by hand (or copying tables into a spreadsheet) with a dataset you can pull into Sheets, a database, Slack alerts or an LLM pipeline.

All data comes from public pages on dnr.wa.gov. No login, no CAPTCHA, no proxy needed, no personal data collected.

What you get

One record per sale row. Example (from the Upcoming Timber Auctions page):

{
    "id": "upcoming:109824:q-flowery-trail:2026-10-27",
    "listing": "upcoming",
    "saleType": "board",
    "auctionDate": "2026-10-27",
    "auctionDateRaw": "10/27/2026",
    "county": "Stevens",
    "region": "NE",
    "regionName": "Northeast",
    "agreementNumber": "109824",
    "fscCertified": false,
    "sfiCertified": true,
    "saleName": "Q FLOWERY TRAIL",
    "packetUrl": "https://dnr.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-08/psl_ts_2610_qflowerytrail.pdf",
    "packetUpdated": null,
    "volumeMbf": 6576,
    "minimumValueUsd": 1306000,
    "valuePerMbfUsd": 198.6,
    "notes": null,
    "sourceUrl": "https://dnr.wa.gov/product-sales-and-leasing/timber-sales/timber-auction-packets/upcoming-timber-auctions",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-24T16:18:13.138Z"
}

Field notes:

Field	Meaning
id	Stable key: listing:agreementNumber:sale-name-slug:auctionDate. Use it to diff runs.
listing	Which page the row came from: upcoming, previous, unsold, gna-results.
saleType	board (Board of Natural Resources approved, larger sales), region (region-manager approved), federal (Good Neighbor Authority sales on federal land), other (e.g. WDFW projects), or unknown if the page label could not be found.
auctionDate	ISO YYYY-MM-DD. auctionDateRaw keeps the original text.
region / regionName	DNR region code and name: NE Northeast, NW Northwest, OLY Olympic, PC Pacific Cascade, SE Southeast, SPS South Puget Sound.
agreementNumber	DNR agreement number as printed (may be a range like 109652-109661 for sort sales).
fscCertified / sfiCertified	true when the FSC / SFI column is marked.
packetUrl	Direct link to the sale packet PDF (maps, cruise data, contract terms).
packetUpdated	Date DNR flagged an update to the packet, if shown.
volumeMbf	Estimated volume in thousand board feet. null on the GNA results table, which has no volume column.
minimumValueUsd	Minimum (appraised) bid value in US dollars.
valuePerMbfUsd	minimumValueUsd / volumeMbf, rounded to cents — a quick stumpage comparison.
notes	DNR notes column, e.g. Reoffer.

Input

Input	Type	Default	What it does
listings	array	["upcoming"]	Pages to scrape: upcoming, previous, unsold, gna-results.
saleTypes	array	all	Keep only board, region, federal, other.
regions	array	all	Keep only these DNR region codes (NE, NW, OLY, PC, SE, SPS).
counties	array	all	Keep only these counties (case-insensitive; multi-county sales such as Grays Harbor, Thurston match on either).
auctionDateFrom	date	–	Keep only auctions on/after this day.
auctionDateTo	date	–	Keep only auctions on/before this day.
minVolumeMbf	integer	–	Keep only sales with at least this volume.
minValueUsd	integer	–	Keep only sales with at least this minimum value.
certifiedOnly	boolean	false	Keep only FSC- or SFI-certified sales.
maxItems	integer	500	Stop after this many saved records (caps your spend).
proxyConfiguration	object	no proxy	Apify Proxy settings; not normally needed for a government site.

Example — all Board sales in the Olympic and Pacific Cascade regions coming up, plus last year's history:

{
    "listings": ["upcoming", "previous"],
    "saleTypes": ["board"],
    "regions": ["OLY", "PC"]
}

Example — large certified sales from 2026 only:

{
    "listings": ["previous"],
    "certifiedOnly": true,
    "minVolumeMbf": 5000,
    "minValueUsd": 1000000,
    "auctionDateFrom": "2026-01-01",
    "auctionDateTo": "2026-12-31"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You pay a small flat fee when a run starts (actor-start) and a per-record fee for every sale row saved to the dataset (timber-sale). Rows removed by your filters or by maxItems are never charged. A typical "upcoming" run returns a few dozen rows; pulling all four listings returns roughly 100–250 rows, i.e. a couple of dollars at most, with no platform usage charges on top. Use maxItems as a hard budget cap.

How it works

The Actor fetches up to four static HTML pages on dnr.wa.gov with Crawlee's CheerioCrawler (one page at a time, 3 retries, descriptive user agent). On each page it finds every table that has a Sale Name column, reads the BOARD SALES / REGION SALES / FEDERAL SALES / OTHER SALES label above the table, parses each row, deduplicates by id, applies your filters, and pushes the rows to the default dataset. A SUMMARY record in the key-value store reports counts.

Limitations

• The page tables carry the summary data only. Acreage, species mix, haul distances and contract terms live inside the sale packet PDFs, which this Actor links to but does not parse.
• Monthly auction results (winning bidder and bid amounts for regular DNR sales) are published as PDFs on the results page and are not parsed in this version; the HTML Good Neighbor Authority results table is included.
• If DNR renames the table labels, rows are still returned with saleType: "unknown" rather than dropped. If DNR renames the Sale Name or Auction Date columns, a release of this Actor will be needed; open an issue and it will be fixed.
• The unsold page is often empty or has a single row; that is the real state of the page, not an error. One WDFW thinning sale lists its volume in tons rather than MBF (its notes say so).
• If none of the pages can be fetched at all, the run fails (non-zero exit) so schedules and monitors notice.

Get alerted when records change

Pair this Actor with Dataset Diff & Alert Monitor to receive only the new, changed or removed records in Slack, Discord, Telegram or a webhook. Schedule the monitor, not this Actor: it runs this Actor for you, compares runs by id, and a run that finds nothing costs only the comparison. A weekly schedule tells you about every new sale and every change to a posted sale before the auction date. The sister Actor for Minnesota is mn-dnr-timber-sales.

{
  "sourceActorId": "mdcurt/wa-dnr-timber-sales",
  "sourceInput": {
    "listings": [
      "upcoming",
      "unsold"
    ]
  },
  "keyFields": [
    "id"
  ],
  "notifyOn": [
    "added",
    "changed"
  ],
  "labelField": "saleName",
  "urlField": "packetUrl",
  "slackWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/…"
}

Changelog

• 1.0.6 (2026-10-24) — README: alert recipe with Dataset Diff & Alert Monitor and link to the Minnesota sister Actor; publish.sh replaced by the generic listing-safe version (the old one is kept as publish.sh.v1).
• 1.0.5 (2026-10-24) — Added publish.sh / publish.json for one-command publishing from the owner's own CLI session.
• 1.0.4 (2026-10-24) — ACTOR_TEST_PROXY_URL env override for sandboxed test runs; pay_per_event.json now documents the built-in Apify events the Store listing actually uses.
• 1.0.3 (2026-10-24) — Added .actor/output_schema.json (required for Store publishing); Output tab now shows the dataset overview and the run SUMMARY.
• 1.0.2 (2026-10-24) — Charging now checks which pay-per-event events are configured in Console and only charges those, so the Actor works with either custom events (actor-start, timber-sale) or Apify's built-in apify-actor-start / apify-default-dataset-item.
• 1.0.1 (2026-10-24) — Live-tested against dnr.wa.gov (all five test inputs pass); county filter now matches multi-county sales; real upcoming page added as an offline regression fixture.
• 1.0.0 (2026-10-24) — Initial release: upcoming, previous, unsold and GNA-results listings; filters by sale type, region, county, date range, volume, value and certification; pay-per-event charging.