So why is wood so high.

jiggyfly · May 26, 2021

Supermac34 said: ↑

Interestingly its the finished wood products that have been so high. Raw lumber is still hard to "give away" to the mills. Mills are already operating at capacity and we've had a glut of raw timber for about a decade. It's the demand side AFTER the mill that has the shortage.
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Interesting.

Seems to be a bit of price gouging or just out of control demand.

jiggyfly · May 26, 2021

So isn't a rise in House demand a good overall thing?

London'sBurning · May 26, 2021

https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/christian-wood-appreciation-thread.308596/

Buck Turgidson · May 26, 2021

London'sBurning said: ↑

https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/christian-wood-appreciation-thread.308596/
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jiggyfly said: ↑

So isn't a rise in House demand a good overall thing?
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Absolutely. He's expiring after next year and I'm sure Tilman would love to get rid of that contract.

jo mama · May 26, 2021

its not just one factor...

lumber mills have not been able to operate at full capacity since the pandemic - theyre still trying to catch up
home building is at record levels - even in non-pandemic times the lumber mills would be struggling to keep up
people staying at home during covid and doing diy remodel projects - big box retailers are gobbling up supply
trump canadian lumber tariffs that he imposed when he took office - tariffs are soooo free market, arent they trump supporters! i know he told yall that the country he is imposing the tariffs on will pay for them, but thats not the way it works. the american consumer pays for them, including the 20% tariff he put on canadian lumber.

i just saw that lumber went up 20% in just the last month. thats on top of 20-30% increases over the last few months.

its been about a month since i looked, but last i saw was this...
9' 2x4 that they use to frame houses was $10/each - was $4/each a year ago
4x8 OSB board that they use as basically the base for all walls and roofs went from $7 to $60.

things will straighten out and prices will come down, but i wouldnt count on it till 2022.

DonatelloLimestone · May 26, 2021

jiggyfly said: ↑

Sounds kinda like the oil industry through the 90's and also seems like an infrastructure issue. It also seems like blip that will work itself out relatively quickly.

Instead, the culprit is the decade of instability and low prices that followed the Great Recession, when America stopped building homes, leaving the lumber trade out to dry. The stunted recovery stripped the industry’s crucial middlemen—the mills themselves—to the bone. Building a new deck is expensive now because mills can’t ramp up to meet the demand surge—or won’t, nervous they’ll get caught with millions in underused machinery when prices crash back to earth.

Nowhere more so than Maine, the nation’s most forested state, where wood and paper make up about 10 percent of the economy. The long-term decline of New England paper mills has taken the bottom out of the timber market here. Lumberjacks like Andrews have nowhere to go with anything that’s not a grade-A saw log; sawmills have nowhere to send the scraps that remain when a cylindrical log is cut into rectangular boards.

Last spring, for example, a digester that processes wood pulp at a paper mill in Jay, Maine, exploded—robbing both Samuel Andrews and Robbins Lumber of a buyer for chips, branches, knotty wood, and the narrow, tapering tops of the tree trunks. The mill’s Pennsylvania-based owners have decided not to replace it, and laid off more than 150 workers. The story is a typical one in Northern states, where slow-growing trees produce higher-quality fiber that goes into dying products like printer paper, newspapers, and phone books. (In the South, where trees grow twice as fast, scraps are better-suited for booming, lower-quality uses like cardboard and toilet paper.)

This symbiosis is important to the sawmills. Eric Kingsley, an industry analyst in Portland, Maine, recently helped a large company study the possibility of putting a sawmill in Maine. “The big constraint wasn’t workforce, it certainly wasn’t log supply, it was ‘What do we do with all these chips?’ Because if another paper mill closes, are we going to be able to move these in 20 years?”
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You're making it too complicated.
Lets see here, wood prices are higher now than they were last year because we had an orange steady hand who said so:

He went away, let alone the details or any of his policies, but then wood got scared and unconfident and prices raised in return

internet politics 101.

Space Ghost · May 26, 2021

As others stated, there is a glut of timber.

Mills got hit pretty hard with COVID and struggling to catch up. Also there are labor shortages.

Home projects have greatly increased during COVID.

New homes are only an issue because many builders have been slow to build due to the initial shut downs and increase price of lumber, thus creating a bigger demand for new homes. Increased saving and inflation fears are driving capital into real estate.

Those extreme lockdowns are starting to show up.

bobrek · May 26, 2021

I'll take questions Deshaun Watson is asked for $200, Alex.

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So why is wood so high.

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