Anyone follow lumber prices?

You might have better luck in the Home/Garden board to get info tailored to Baton Rouge

Get a fixed price contract. I finance a lot of builders and prices are all over the place. Market will come down, but they can’t find it from an inventory standpoint. Hearing they can’t only buy lumber almost real time right now.

Seeing a lot of people building homes get last minute surprises when their budgets go up by $8-$10k just for wood.

Main thing is if someone is building it for you - find out who pays for a large upswing in price between contract signing and install.

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Is this the right board for this post?

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Fence posts go on the fence board.

Lumber is through the roof right now. I would hold off as long as possible until it drops to a more normal level. Sheets of OSB are 2-4x what they were a year ago.

Builders are finding ways to cut costs elsewhere to make up for that massive increase. I would not buy a house from any large/production builder that was built in 2020/2021.

Yep homes in the neighborhood going for 300-350k early 2020 are now going for 400-450k

This is why you always buy used, including vehicles. Zillow says our 1976 $270k property now over $335k, I kinda believe it though. Paid off 10 years ago, zing. Quarter-million dollar loan in 2009 was scary as hell. Sweat, breathe, and believe in yourself.

I work at a relatively small commercial building supply company in Nashville. I’m the lumber purchaser. Sentiment in the market right now is a little strange but pine lumber (used for pressure treated) prices have printed down over the last 2 weeks (on aggregate). That said 1x’s, 2x4’s, and 2x12’s printed flat or even up in some cases. We may never see the prices from this time last year ever again. Without going into too much detail lumber production on the mill level is lacking (covid issues) and low interest rates are causing massive amounts of building across the country (high demand). I will keep an eye on the market and try to remember to post again if it takes a turn downward but it looks like this slight correction over the past couple of weeks might be just that... a slight correction for now. I don’t think lumber can sustain this high price but it’s not clear to me when we will see a drop. For prices to be flat and up in some cases in January just isn’t the norm so it’s hard to guess what will happen with spring around the corner and more stimulus checks (aka people fixing their decks and fences). I know that was long winded but that’s my view. Good luck!

I'm beginning to build on an empty lot which I've paused until there is some stability in prices. thanks for info

Lumber prices will stay high for probably the rest of the year.

How does one follow commodity prices for things like lumber? Is there an ETF that tracks a construction cost index, commodity prices or something similar? I'd buy a few shares of the 'lumber stock' proxy if I were building to insulate me from price swings and to help me profit from the risit costs. I did this I 2008 with rising gas costs, buying energy ETFs.

Edit: I think I'm asking about commodity futures, where can we see what lumber will cost in the future.