Prices paid for goods used in residential construction did not change in May (not seasonally adjusted) according to the latest Producer Price Index (PPI)ย releasedย by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As a result, building materials prices have grown much more slowly in 2019 (+3.1%) than they did over the same period in 2018, during which they increased 4.7%.
Recent expansions of mill capacity have helped push prices lower. For example, North American softwood lumber production capacity increased by one billion board feet in 2018 even after accounting for hundreds of millions of board feet in capacity lost from mill closures in Oregon and Canada. Another 700 million board feet has or is scheduled to come online in 2019.