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> I guess when you cannot get timber i thought timber wasn't the bottleneck here, at least not in the US? from what i know, US timber has a glut of supply, som

• ggm 3y ago
  Yes. I think the fine-grained differences of meaning here matter. Good call. I am less sure why the same thing happened here in Australia because we have a huge logging, processing and distributing system domestically and for export, but we also had massive shortages of framing supplies. I suspect it was the timber/lumber distinction, maybe the woods available on-shore weren't being directed into framing and this depends on cheaper sources off-shore, which just disappeared. Our cost of construction has gone up so much a lot of builders are going bust. It's causing angst in a hot market, house prices and rents out of control, and the government intervening but the industry says it can't build that much more than is on the table, its not lack of desire, it's lack of capacity in construction overall. Most of the fixes simply increase housing cost inflation. But this glitch on framing wood and related products, was really bad for us.
  • fy20 3y ago
    Europe also has a shortage, as it turned out a lot of both timber and lumber came from Russia. This has pushed up demand for imports from North America, which I guess has a knock on effect to other regions. Prices in Europe still haven't dropped back to their original levels. In my country pellets for heating were €150 per ton in 2021, €600 per ton (and much worse quality) in 2022, and now are around €300 per ton.