The building industry is once again on fire, and too many are stating, “I don’t have enough time” all too often. If your group is always talking about needing more people, equipment, and time, improving time management would undoubtedly benefit you. Improving time management...

Many of the problems we hear about and actually see on jobsites, both offsite and site built, involve the poor quality of standard SPF #2. When I was the General Manager of a large lumber yard back in the 1980s, it wasn’t much better. I can still remember the yard men cutting the steel...

Build-To-Rent: Overlooked Obvious Not to be sacrilegious, but things in the lumber market are feeling apocalyptic. My primary concerns about the lumber and OSB market right now are two-fold. One, blatant disregard and unnatural comfort with prices. One of our members asked if he should...

In his March 22, 2021 piece in the Wall Street Journal, Jon Hilsenrath’s article title says it all: “Stimulus Checks Have Left U.S. Households Ready to Spend.” Apparently, a lot of study has gone into how the population spends their cash windfalls, and the trend is...

Panels are the quandary, rather resins and glue. Widespread announcements of further supply disruptions and declarations of Force Majeure are crippling OSB flooring, siding, and roofing panels. I must step in right here to call B.S. Force majeure is a common clause in contracts which...

Looking Around the Corner LEST WE NOT FORGET... the current lumber market condition is the by-product of a major disruption, not a lasting trend. The disruption consists of the following. Accelerated millennial transition from urban to suburban areas. This has created another...

Our industry has been changing in a big way. Independents once dominated our industry, but now through mergers and acquisitions, that is no longer the case. Right now, some of the people reading this article are either contemplating or in actual talks about selling their business. From...

            Last month’s article, Change Impact, talks about what impact changes at your company will have this year. Well, after 2020 and the challenges we faced, especially for the operations-intensive companies in our industry, it...

A recent Wall Street Journal article written by Julia Pollack on 12/10/20 discusses the reasons why 2021 could be the year of a great comeback. In “Why the U.S. Economy Will Take Off in 2021,” Ms. Pollack touches on the pre-pandemic economy, when unemployment was at record lows and...

COVID’s 2021 Reverse Impact Let’s see if we can get this one right. A member recently requested that I forecast when the misses were going to happen. Sounds difficult, but not impossible. COVID 2020 was a once in a lifetime paradigm shift in our learning curve. To date, I have...