Weekly Softwood Lumber Blog

Sales of new homes in the US have bumped up and down for the second half of this year and recovered upward once again in October. While it is true that a slow-down is apparent in both construction and home buying activity, it is important to note that new building activity year-to-date remains almost even […]

Even while actual prices remained flat, there was a general sense of the usual seasonal slowdown coming for sawmills and the lumber industry. This is because the order files at producers have shrunk from a month to barely two weeks. Expectations are, that as construction activity drops off during the winter months, lumber demand will […]

The latest North American construction framing dimension softwood lumber prices and market commentary, by Madison’s Lumber Reporter for the end of November 2022 Check back with the Madison’s Lumber Reporter website madisonsreport.com often for the latest updates for the latest developments and updates. In the week ending November 25, 2022, the price of WSPF 2×4 […]

In mid-November the annual North American Wholesale Lumbermen’s Association gathering took many traders away from their desks to hob-nob with their colleagues, often determining between themselves the condition for lumber sales to the end of the year. As such, sales were slow but somewhat consistent, and prices remained steady. True winter weather came on in […]

After a pop the previous month, sales of new US single-family homes dropped again in September. There were 603,000 new single-family homes sold last month, which is down -10.9% from the downwardly revised August rate of 677,000 and is a -17.6% drop compared to September 2021 when it was 732,000. Only 6,000 new homes sold […]

The beginning of November brought a slight firming up for lumber prices, due to recent sawmill curtailments — especially in British Columbia — and ongoing reasonable sales volumes. Customers found inventories in the field quite scarce thus had to come back to producers for their purchases. As the usual seasonal slowdown ihttps://madisonsreport.com/s upon us, and […]

Go to the websitehttps://madisonsreport.com/subscribe/to get a sample of the full 500 individual lumber and panel commodity prices for that week, as well as the market commentary explaining why the prices are changing. Total housing starts in the US for September 2022 fell -8.1% to 1.439 million units compared to the 1.566 million units reported for […]

Staying even from the previous week, in the week ending October 28, 2022, the price of benchmark softwood lumber item Western Spruce-Pine-Fir 2×4 #2&Btr KD (RL) was again US$480 mfbm, said weekly forest products industry price guide newsletter Madison’s Lumber Reporter. This is down by -$44, or -8%, from one month ago when it was US$524 mfbm. […]

As October drew to a close, significant production curtailments at several large British Columbia lumber producers helped keep softwood lumber prices flat. Most of these operators cited high log costs vs lower lumber prices as the reason for taking this downtime. Meanwhile, it seemed that Weyerhaueser and the union came to an agreement, so the […]