Tens of thousands of homeowners have used the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to complete that home improvement project or expansion they’ve been talking about for years. But they’ve run into a big problem: not enough wood.
The demand for lumber has skyrocketed over the past year as hunkered-down homeowners remodeled, low mortgage rates triggered a building boom, and lumber processors and distributors got disrupted. Home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s couldn’t keep it on their shelves, and prices soared as a result. At one point, the price of a two-by-four plank was more than three times its normal price.
“We can’t get it fast enough,” Mike Viozzi, the general manager of Lesser Lumber in Pennsylvania, said. “It’s almost a little concerning. People don’t even care anymore what it costs. They just kind of get it.”
The boom began last year when sawmills shut down along with everything else. Even now, many sawmills are operating at half-capacity because of pandemic regulations, which has made it impossible to keep up with lumber demands.
This has been great for the sawmills — but that’s about it. The cost to build a house has risen about 25% over the past year, making it more difficult for buyers to afford the market. And timber growers who provide the mills with logs haven’t benefited from this boom at all. In fact, sawmills are paying the lowest prices they’ve paid in decades, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I’m not making anything,” said Joe Hopkins, who runs a 70,000-acre timber farm in the South.
The disparity between timber and lumber prices has shocked foresters such as Hopkins, who are used to seeing the prices walk hand in hand. But the problem for timber growers is that while we have too few two-by-fours, we have a ton of logs. So many trees have been planted between the Carolinas and Texas over the past decade that foresters believe it could take another 10 to 20 years before enough trees are felled for loggers to turn a profit.
Even as two-by-fours sell for $7 to $8 a plank, softwood logs are only averaging $22.50 a ton, the least since 1992, according to TimberMart-South.
“We used to be considered wealthy,” Hopkins said. “I don’t see wealth. I see tax bills.”
