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Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

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Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#271

Post by orthoxerox »

blitzar wrote: post #245
pjc50 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just pictured a typical computer developer in a wet lot, with an unhappy wife. Have you heard of the TV programme Grand Designs ? It's just this over and over again. Sometimes the wife is pregnant, sometimes they're living in a caravan on site. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs They're not trying to build anything as simple as a house, either, the "grand" part implies some mad architectural vision…

> Sometimes the wife is pregnant The mid project reveal is always "surprise we are pregnant". It brings me great added joy when they are building a 'dream' 3 bedroom house and it is the 3rd kid that they are pregnant with.

One bedroom for the parents, two bedrooms for the kids. As long as all kids conform to the gender binary, two bedrooms should be enough.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#272

Post by karolist »

dubberx wrote: post #266
karolist wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person who built his aerated concrete house working a day job over 3 years, he did 98% of the tasks himself and probably 95% of those alone whilst maintaining a full-time day job. He has a non-english blog with many pictures and process documentation and was a huge inspiration to me whilst I DIY'd my new 2 bdr apartment from this https://imgur.com/a/UXfmx0Y to this https://imgur.com/a/vGntuhJ in the span of…

Would you consider sharing an url to the blog you mentioned? Planning to DIY myself a tinyhouse so I’d love to read a blog like that. (Contact info in my profile if you don’t want to post it publicly)

irnamas.blogspot.com, should be readable with a translator to English, I suggest reading it like a book, from the first posts!

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#273

Post by roland35 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #13

"If high prices held you back from building, you are in luck, as the tables have now turned" Except... many builders will find some other reason/excuse where prices are high to keep prices high. We were looking at building a house - talked to builder last November and... looking at $470-$480k range (ballpark estimate). Lumber was going higher, but we'd reduced the house plan size. Lumber kept going up... and up... Th…

I feel your pain... I was looking at building a house (with a national builder) and the historical prices in that neighborhood showed that the price went up about 30% in the past year. I think most of that was just the general price of housing, not just raw materials.

We decided to stay put in our existing home for the time being. I don't think housing prices will likely go down much, but maybe level off a bit? The rise in the Case-Shiller index certainly doesn't look sustainable: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#274

Post by ryanackley »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #37
mgkimsal wrote: post #13

"If high prices held you back from building, you are in luck, as the tables have now turned" Except... many builders will find some other reason/excuse where prices are high to keep prices high. We were looking at building a house - talked to builder last November and... looking at $470-$480k range (ballpark estimate). Lumber was going higher, but we'd reduced the house plan size. Lumber kept going up... and up... Th…

I would wait. I'm an licensed inactive General Contractor. If 14 months ago, they were building them for $450,000, I'd wait. I'd shop around for another contractor too. A young guy starting out, might save you a lot. (There's no way to verify he knows what he's doing though.) If you are some what handy, it's not that difficult to owner build your own house. That is if you get the blueprints past the town's council. G…

The biggest problem with being an owner builder is you don't have an ongoing relationship with sub-contractors. Which means that for any subs you hire, you will be their lowest priority and their smallest concern. Also, you don't really know what you're doing so you will think they made a mistake when they didn't and you won't always recognize real mistakes.

I did this for my new house that was being built before, during, and after the peak of the pandemic. I wouldn't do it again. We're moved in now and we find small mistakes all the time that an experienced contractor would have easily spotted during construction. It makes me wonder what we can't see. Oh and it's impossible to get the subs back out to fix the problems because they have all their money at this point.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#275

Post by imtringued »

tayo42 wrote: post #98
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mortgage borrowing costs are at historic lows.

its still expensive to borrow $700,000, on top of your current expenses. that's an extra payment of $3300, whos got that laying around to wait for a house to be built

Assuming a 4% interest rate and 30 year mortgage that 700k house will also cost you $500k in interest and therefore the financing cost of that house is $1.2 million. The fun part: dropping interest to 0% raises the price of the house to $1.2 million without raising the financing cost.

What dropping interest rates does is not prop up the price of housing, it's increasing the resale value of the housing you already pay for.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#277

Post by op00to »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #213
20after4 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intermediary like the mob, perhaps?

Do mobs do this? No, I meant a legitimate intermediary. If builders get to overcommit and then cancel on their customers, why shouldn't a customer be able to do it too? The intermediary would just offer a service of doing that for you - booking multiple companies for your construction project, waiting until the last second, and cancelling all but one.

Builders often require a nonrefundable deposit to purchase materials prior to the start of a job. That’s where the squeeze happens, after you’ve already selected your contractor.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#278

Post by hutzlibu »

headmelted wrote: post #197
spiderfarmer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a web developer in 2019 building my own office and it never collapsed even once.

If you were a web developer in 2019 building your own office that never collapsed I have to assume that's only up until the last thing you can remember. May you rest in peace.

2 years uptime without major technology change, is quite amazing in the modern fast paced web dev world ..

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#279

Post by gassius »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #158
gassius wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about lumber market and it's transitory conditions and fluctuations (other than a last week news where I live, northern Spain, that said that woods price are at all time high supposedly because demand is also at records high, from international markets including japan) so it may very well be a transitory price fluctuation because WFH or whatever. That being said, taking out the "runaway" adjecti…

I'm more than onboard with the idea that recent monetary policies have put pressure on prices, I just don't see how anyone can sanely say that a 4x price increase is (was) "caused by inflation". Of course implying that all or the vast majority of the increase is directly attributable to inflation, adding "runaway" back into the discussion.

Yeah I didn't intend it like an antagonistic answer, because actually is not a binary issue. Price takes in account many consideration, fluctuations in production and/or demand are one, monetary pressure is other, but there are many others (expectation of future behavior, for example). I would guess that, at this time, the larger the increase ratio, the more probable is that transitory elements are affecting the price.

Just a minor caveat I would have with your answer is that inflation cause price increase, when for me the price increase is just an indicator of inflation, not a cause or consequence of it.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#280

Post by orthoxerox »

dubberx wrote: post #266
karolist wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person who built his aerated concrete house working a day job over 3 years, he did 98% of the tasks himself and probably 95% of those alone whilst maintaining a full-time day job. He has a non-english blog with many pictures and process documentation and was a huge inspiration to me whilst I DIY'd my new 2 bdr apartment from this https://imgur.com/a/UXfmx0Y to this https://imgur.com/a/vGntuhJ in the span of…

Would you consider sharing an url to the blog you mentioned? Planning to DIY myself a tinyhouse so I’d love to read a blog like that. (Contact info in my profile if you don’t want to post it publicly)

Masonry is usually harder than framing, especially when you live in the US where framing is overwhelmingly more popular. You can get pre-cut studs for your preferred ceiling height; OSB, housewrap, insulation, windows all match standard frame dimensions; roof trusses are common and affordable; renting a nailer and a miter saw is easy.

I don't know if it's the same guy, but I watched videos of a guy laying aerated concrete blocks himself and it's much more work: you need a good supplier of blocks with good dimenions, you still have to rasp down and sand down the tops of each row so they form a perfectly horizontal plane for the next row or the glue won't catch, door and window gaps are tricky and upper floors are even trickier if you want to use aerated concrete for the floor/ceiling.

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