Indian sandalwood firm Quintis looks to sell one of its biggest projects

Indian sandalwood company Quintis is looking to sell one of its major projects in the Northern Territory years before harvesting a single tree.

Quintis sold the west side of Stylo Station near Mataranka for $2.1 million in June and sold a freehold block near Katherine called Eagle Park West in February for $800,000.

It put the rest of Stylo Station on the market this week.

The property has a 5,800 megalitre a year water licence and about 800 hectares of sandalwood trees.

Qunitis, formerly known as TFS, bought Stylo Station in 2015 from a cattle producer and political candidate Tina McFarlane, in a deal that attracted a lot of controversy.

The company said in a statement that the sandalwood plantation in Stylo had underperformed for a variety of reasons and it was looking to sell and focus on its other plantations near Katherine, the Douglas Daly NT the Burdekin region of Queensland and the Ord Valley region of Western Australia.

Sales agent Andrew Gray said the property was likely to attract interest from the horticultural sector and businesses wanting to expand on food production already in the district. He said the cattle industry could also be interested in its potential to grow fodder crops.

He said that whoever buys will remove the sandalwood trees.

The property, which is being marketed under a new name of Roper Plains, is expected to fetch about $9.5 million.

That's based on comparable sales and the fact that it's likely the new owner will have the expense of removing the sandalwood trees, Mr Gray said.

He said that Quintis was not planning any other property sales.

In 1999, TFS planted sandalwood trees in the Ord Irrigation Scheme and grew quickly into the world's largest producer of exotic timber, valued for its heartwood oil.

It expanded across the border into the Northern Territory in 2012 but crashed after a rebrand of Quintis in 2017 after a scathing report by an American short seller and a string of revelations that the company had lost major customers without information from the market.

In late 2018 Quintis was re-emerged as a private company after a $145 million takeover by global investment giant BlackRock.

The company's operations in the Ord Valley seem to be going well, with new trees planted this year and a record harvest of about 60,000 sandalwood trees.

Its first harvest in the Northern Territory is not expected until 2027.

According to its website, Quintis' sandalwood estate is still the largest in the world, spanning more than 12,000 hectares and home to more than 5.5 million trees.