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Prices for plywood going through roof
September 19, 2003
By SETH HARKNESS Herald Staff
The price of plywood has nearly doubled at many lumberyards this summer, when it’s available at all, but most local contractors say they have enough of this basic material to keep building for now.
Half-inch CDX plywood — a staple of the building trade used to sheath walls and roofs — sold for $13 a sheet in June at Brandon Lumber & Mill Work. On Wednesday, the same sheet of 4-by-8-foot plywood cost $23.50 at the Brandon yard, with several other local building supply businesses charging as much or more.
John Moulton, a worker at Brandon Lumber, said as far as he was concerned, the price spike wasn’t the worst part of a national plywood shortage.
“The bad part is I don’t have any,” he said.
At Goodro Lumber in Killington, where a half-inch sheet of CDX sells for $28 these days, the store’s plywood inventory is about 75 percent lower than it was before the shortage, according to salesman Seth Shaw, whose family owns the business.
Shaw said Goodro is expecting a delivery within the week, but for now some customers are traveling to Manchester, N.H., to get their supplies and others may be disappointed.
“Right now, if you contracted to build a first-floor deck and you needed ¾-inch plywood, we wouldn’t have any,” he said.
A builder of condominiums and houses in Killington said he was able to avoid this situation. After his building supplier alerted him to the possibility of a shortage, Richard Moore said he stockpiled about 300 sheets and, for now, he has all he needs.
Pete Giancola of Giancola Construction said he hasn’t needed a lot of plywood lately, but if the price stays high it could affect upcoming projects he agreed to build months ago when prices were half of what they are now.
“I’m worried I won’t be able to buy the materials at the price I bid the job at,” he said.
As a large buyer, Giancola said, he felt he would have some leverage in obtaining a better price than someone buying a truckload or two to build a garage. Small builders who didn’t stockpile and can’t lobby for a favorable price, as well as small retailers, will probably be harder hit by the plywood shortage than their larger counterparts.
With its tremendous buying power, Home Depot has managed to keep plywood prices relatively low. Sales of the building material have actually increased at the chain’s Rutland store since the shortage occurred, according to a salesman there.
Sheets of half-inch CDX sold for $18.29 at Home Depot on Wednesday, and a number of smaller lumber dealers had been coming into the store to buy plywood to put on their own shelves, said Home Depot salesman Don Hagen.
“They come in and they buy us out,” he said.
The store has been selling out its daily delivery of nearly 400 sheets of plywood and 480 sheets of particle board, which Hagen said was more than it was selling before the price spike.
Even Home Depot’s comparatively low plywood prices came as a shock to Bill and Matt Vander Karr on Wednesday. The two brothers, both Castleton State College students, said they had come to the hardware store for lumber to build a beer pong table.
“I can’t believe it,” said Bill, a junior. “Three-quarter inch would have been nice, but it’s $21 a shot.”
“We came expecting to pay $8 to $10,” said Matt, a sophomore.
One lumber salesman explained the shortage as a combination of factors that had sent a “perfect storm” through the plywood market this summer.
The stage for the shortage was set by falling prices in the plywood industry over the last several years, said Lang Durfee at Bethel Mills builders’ supply in Bethel. This led to production cutbacks and to retailers maintaining minimal inventories, since the lumber became cheaper the longer they waited to buy it, he said.
Demand for housing, and plywood, shot up this summer when an uptick in interest rates convinced many people to get into the housing market while interest rates were still low, he said. The shortage hit when small inventories and shrinking supplies could not match this demand, he said.
The problem, or at least the perception of a problem, was worsened by forest fires and the federal government’s $50 million plywood order to be used in the reconstruction of Iraq.
“That added fuel to the fire,” Durfee said.
Durfee said he thought the market would correct itself by the end of the year. In the near future, the price could go even higher if Hurricane Isabel creates a reconstruction boom along its storm path, pointed out Ron Ryan, an assistant manager at LaValley Building Supply.
So far, though, Durfee said he had not seen anybody change their building plans because of expensive plywood.
“It’s added a lot to the coffee shop talk,” he said, “but we haven’t seen any projects delayed or canceled because of the plywood shortage.”
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