I saw this report today, from last week, saying that housing starts are down. But I am curious…
Is this nationwide? Looking at it from I’m sitting (a small lumber yard owner in Maine), things are still crazy busy. I’ve got more takeoffs than I know what to do with, and trying to keep track of which housing starts are at what stage in the process (so I can get builders their material when they need it). I think we’re still benefiting from a lot of folks in MA and NY whose companies let them work remote now. I mean, if you can work remote, why wouldn’t you build a house on a lake in Maine and work from there, right?
Lumber prices tanked in July (a couple weeks earlier than they did last year), and I would think that makes up for any interest rate hikes. When I say tanked, I mean things like 3/4 Advantec going from almost $100 a sheet (retail) to down in the $50-ish range, and 2x4x8 studs (premium grade, not the box store lumber) going from $10-$11 bucks a pop to $5 and change. Last year was a little more dramatic (because things went higher), but still, I’m not really seeing the slowdown up here.
Some things are still hard to get a hold of (unfinished cedar shingles and certain colors of vinyl siding are all I can think of off the top of my head), but for the most part my supply chain is WAY more back to normal than it was in 2020.
Hmmmm… That would take a lot of doing, and I’m guessing probably not. Our ERP has an MsSQL database locked up in a private proprietary cloud, so I’m at the mercy of the reports they’ve built into the system (this is troublesome, like only giving us a single “you don’t have enough,” reorder point on items – we have different reorder points in Maine for 2x4x8s when we’re in July than we do when it’s January). If I was using something with a DB backend (like MySQL) that I could query however I wanted, it’d be way easier. I can try with what I’ve got, but it would take a couple solid week’s worth of going through individual invoices to see, and even then I’d wonder if my hunch is correct. Sorry…
I made my statements in the initial post based on “a feel,” I had. I do know we’re up 5-8% this year in sales, based on Jan-Jul 2021 and 2022 numbers, and I’m noticing our good contractors (the ones I’d recommend if a homeowner called asking for referrals) are still wicked busy – months out before they can start anything new. We’ve snagged some new customers over the last year that were unhappy with other yards though, and that may be skewing the numbers. And those skewed numbers would be there probably regardless of which ERP we’re using.
I apologize, if my answer is “clear as mud.” I’m very interested to see what other folks on the front lines have to say.
It’s important to note that while month-over-month starts and permits are down (permits only slightly), compared to one year ago the numbers are up.
Even more important … year-to-date housing construction AND home sales data is up! So the first seven months of this year are higher than Jan - July 2021
(albeit things are slowing down now, which is normal for the seasonal cycle).
"Total starts year-to-date are up almost +4% compared to the first seven months of 2021. "
"During the first seven months of this year there was a +3.2% increase in building permits from the same period in 2021. "
There’s a lot of stats to compare between housing permits, starts, construction, and sales. Are there any other numbers we should be following to get a more complete picture here?