Page 9 - Random Lengths News Today

For the first time in recent memory, a lumberyard was the one selling wood to a supplier. Needless to say, this kind of trade - where a customer sells goods to its traditional supplier - is virtually unheard of. MaterialsXchange, a Chicago-based digital trading platform for physical wood products, reports that the trade involved a lumberyard selling about 30,000 square feet of oriented strand board, or OSB ( a cheaper stand-in for plywood that is widely used to make house floors and walls). �...

Commercial Construction costs rise 12.8% in a year Some projects ‘in jeopardy of being put on hold,’ one contractor says Casey Port In December, developer Joe Cordaro received bids totaling $6.95 million for an apartment and commercial project planned on Eighth Street in West Des Moines.  Three months later, the project was rebid. The cost? $7.72 million, an 11% increase from the first bid. “The cost changes were insane,” said Cordaro, principal of West De...

April 2021 – $95.98 /sheet That is 252% price increase on one of the most used piece of common lumber for construction.” Not surprisingly, this post got flagged on Facebook for being “misinformation”. But then PolitiFact looked into this, and they confirmed that the price of plywood really has risen to such levels… Shawn Church, editor of Random Lengths, which publishes price data on the wood products industry, gave us figures for 23/32-inch plywood produced in the Pacific Northwest ...

Would you pay $100 for a sheet of plywood?  I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but we are almost there.  The price of plywood has been soaring into the stratosphere in recent weeks, and analysts are telling us that it will remain high for the foreseeable future.  Memes about plywood have started to pop up all over social media, but this is no joking matter.  These extraordinarily high prices are causing a lot of pain in the homebuilding industry, and many Americans have had to postpone co...

April 15, 2021 Continue Reading Skyrocketing lumber prices have kept some builders away from purchasing in hopes costs would level out, but now lumber prices are expected to spike even higher. Spring and summer building and buying season is here and demand is even higher. Lumber prices reached $1,048 per thousand board feet last week, according to Random Lengths—a 193% increase from one year ago. But just this week, the May futures contract price per thousand board feet of two-by-fours...

Unions, Black Community Rallies to Save Ralphs Jobs Details JOBS POLITICS--Faced with the closing of five stores in the Los Angeles area, including South Los Angeles in predominantly Black neighborhoods and two in Long Beach, unions, community groups, seniors and shoppers rallied April 3 at the Slauson Avenue Ralphs grocery store. Kroger, the parent company of Ralphs, Food 4 Less and other stories around the country, took this drastic step in reaction to the mandated...

Homebuyers, renovators battle ‘unprecedented’ lumber costs Lumber, pictured here in the yard of Dillman & Upton in Rochester, has seen costs skyrocket across the country over the past year. Photo by Deb Jacques Now, the latest product to become scarce amid COVID-19 is lumber. Lumber costs are at an all-time high, spiking over 180% since last April, according to Random Lengths — which provides reports of market activity, prices and other analyses for the wood products industry. But what...

Many of the shortages linked to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic are now a memory. You might not find your favorite brand of toilet paper on a given visit to the store, but chances are good that you will find toilet paper, and paper towels, too. But some of the patterns of 2020 — especially those apparent during the active warm-weather months — seem destined to repeat themselves as we look ahead to another summer shaped in part by restrictions and increased demand. Here is an inco...

Homebuilders are turning away customers — for custom-built homes at least — because of uncertainty surrounding soaring lumber prices. "We have been hammered by lumber prices," said Jim Schuff, co-owner of Vesta Homes in Moore and president of the Oklahoma Home Builders Association. "How do you even begin to price a project that will take six months or more to complete?" He said even some speculative builders — those who build houses to sell with no buyers already under ...

Record High Lumber Prices Still Hindering Home Building The problems that plagued the home building industry in 2020 seem to have followed it into the new year. ablokhin/Getty Images After normalizing slightly at the end of 2020, lumber prices steadily climbed back up throughout the first weeks of 2021 and hit record highs in early February. This on-going surge in the cost of lumber and other construction materials has become a major issue for contractors and home buyers, complicating home bui...