Lumber Prices Stabilize to New Normal Levels
With extreme volatility of lumber markets in 2021 and 2022 in the rearview, look to more stable, normal prices going forward this year. Prices for Western spruce-pine-fir (SPF) went up to $446 per thousand board feet this week.
According to Business in Vancouver, that should be good for B.C. sawmills. Over the past year, a number of B.C. sawmills have taken either temporary curtailments or been shuttered for good, due in no small part to high operating costs and a dwindling supply of affordable timber.
“Those mills that have slowed down and been curtailed and been rotating through curtailment are going to come back online,” Kosman predicts. “What I think is that, where we’ve been seeing a lot of these curtailments, especially in the past year, there’s going to be way less of that now.”
