The great lumber price gouge of 2020 2021

[Jay Hinrichs]

AS anyone who has been buying any kind of dimensional lumber knows prices have sky rocketed as much as 400% for some items in the last year.

To me it seems like price fixing gouging..  at least here in the Northwest which is timber country  Saw mill country etc.

I was talking to my old partner in my land and timber company of the 90s and I was asking him what he is doing this logging season.. Fully expected him to say they are going to do great etc with the demand.
Answer was shocking:

He is probably not going to log at all.. the Mills have LOWERED delivered Log prices to almost 1980s level .

The reason is all the fires here in Oregon have the mills salvage logging like crazy and they have more logs then they know what to do with and they get good stump age prices from the public lands and then private log prices follow that .. so they have a year or so to log like made to get the fire damaged logs in and milled while they are still marketable.

So over supply of logs yet lumber sky rocketed.. whats going on ????  Mills making a killing  Lumber brokers making a killing ?   I am going fishing in a few months with a friend of mine that owned a few saw mills here in Oregon and sold out to Weyerhouser and retired about 7 or 8 years ago see if he has any inside of what is going on.

[Chris Mason]

Funny, I was just thinking "Jay was the dude who purchased homes to sell the logging rights, and immediately resell the home after, I wonder what he's up to now that lumber is going to the moon?"

Concurrent to that, a meme went low-key semi-viral on the book of faces. The content was basically "I have decided to start purchasing real estate in order to scrap the homes for lumber to sell" semi maybe sarcastically, maybe not, maybe joking, maybe not.

And then my next thought was "OK, so I bet Jay H is out there in PNW looking for teardown quality homes with high DOM not selling, that also have a few trees on them, and he's going to harvest all of it -- live trees and dead."

Following this thread. :)

Is it the supply chain thing? If you're saying the raw trees are selling to the mills for cheap, does that mean it's the shipping it from point A to point B that's the hiccup?