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Softwood Lumber Prices Mostly Flat While US Housing Starts Jump Almost 17% for December
New home building in the United States skyrocketted, by almost 17%, last month however this is after an almost equally sharp drop in November. Reasonably clement weather in the densely-populated US northeast last week allowed for quite robust construction activity, providing softwood lumber sellers the opportunity to hold prices mostly flat. Sudden winterly weather hit…
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North America Construction Framing Dimension Softwood Lumber Prices Firm over 2019-End
As expected by most softwood lumber players at the end of last year, the generally buoyant demand for construction framing dimension lumber products at the end of 2019 carried through to somewhat strengthening prices in the first week back to work for sawmills across Canada and the US in 2020. The latest round of sawmill…
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US Economy, Home Building 2020
While Canada has diversified it’s softwood lumber export destinations since the US housing market downturn of 2008 to …. well, in a way still ongoing, the US remains solid customer of 60% of Canada’s softwood lumber production by volume. Macroeconomic conditions in the US have changed drastically in the past decade; not just the Millennial…
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US Home Building 2020
“The main issue is — the price of homes in the US remains too high and the lack of good affordable housing,” said Don Magruder, CEO of RoMac Building Supply, in Daily Commercial online at the end of 2019. For the most part, this account is a good description of the US housing market. Affordable…
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Softwood Lumber and US Housing Market: 2020
The start of a new year, not to mention new decade, always heralds annual wrap-ups and predictions for the coming year. The end of last year did bring some clarity to several economics questions that had proved murky since mid-2018. For their part, construction framing softwood lumber prices ended 2019 generally even compared to the…
