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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
September 2019 #11242 Page #94
Lumber Briefs By Matt Layman Publisher, Layman’s Lumber Guide
Lumber & Housing Market Forecast Housing is Over Built; Lumber is the Honey Hole
ost of the time, the daily news and world events do not have a significant impact on how we buy and sell lumber. This recent stuff is different. It’s scary. All the trade and economic balls are in the air, and politically the U.S. is arguably the most unstable of the three countries making all the rules...America, Russia, and China.
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Not only are we dealing with global economic and social instability, we are engaged in a political Civil War. Lawmakers skirmish daily, watching one half of our governing body discrediting and weakening the other...all the while proclaiming that we are a safe nation because we are “free,” wealthy, and physically more powerful and resolute. All of that, as significant as it is, does not change the fact that tomorrow we have to go to work and buy and sell lumber for a profit, so let’s begin with the big picture. Our lumber market is in a transition period of adjusting production lower as not to oversupply declining housing demand. That’s right. I said it. Declining!!! Our dilemma is, where business is good, it is very good and that is where all the noise is coming from. Elsewhere there’s no noise…no talk of poor business in thousands of stagnant, under-employed rural communities. The U.S. Census Bureau, National Home Builders Association, and National Association of Realtors has no month-to-month data on where housing is not working. All we hear about is a strong national economy supported by the U.S. consumer, who on the average has $38,000 in revolving credit debt at high interest rates. The propaganda continues to zoom in on prosperity, which does not include an obvious, over-looked increasing percentage of the population who cannot afford to own a home, and likely never will. We need a new number, akin to unemployment. How many folks are unwilling to own a home? If 4% is full employment, what % is full home ownership? I submit that, in the current economic, political, and social environment...we are at, or very near, full home ownership. The % of consumers that cannot afford a down payment, much less the added expense of home ownership versus renting, are the same consumers economists cite as holding up the entire economy. The ruse is, the unqualifiable, pay-check-to-pay-check consumers are mistakenly counted among potential home buyers as are approximately 50% of millennials who will never have owned a home well into their 40s and over 30% who will never own a home.
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