wHen Uri Sasson的手机按木材订单为他的公司正在纽约州Nyack建造的公寓大楼，他经常受到另一个令人震惊的价格变化的打击。

“Every time I call for delivery the numbers change,” he says. A decline in April provided small comfort considering what’s happened to the overall lumber prices in the last 18 months during work on Sasson’s 33-unitGateway Loftsapartment building. When you are in the middle of construction, he says, "you really can’t stop.”

Booming house and apartment constructionare one economic signature of the pandemic, but lumber’s price surge is causing homebuilders and contractors a market-wide case of agita. Sasson’s development company performs its own construction and he declined to say how much unexpected lumber increases have added to the cost of his long-planned rental project.

为了解释木材，经济学家和市场分析师引用供求不平衡的情况，当价格较低时，锯木厂的生产削减，由于19年的造成的生产和运输困难而麻烦。

Others note the combinations of market factors shaping prices. Homebuilders and distributors on the front lines sort these factors, choose the ones that make sense, add a few of their own, and with housing demand setting records, press on with construction.

以前的商品价格飞跃以前已经陷入了建设。钢和其他商品再次很高，但木材是当前通货膨胀周期中的杰出表现。

There are several measures. According to Bloomberg and Wells Fargo, a generic lumber price that was around $600 per 1,000 board-ft in early 2018, has nearly tripled to $1,645 as of May.

A Commodity Lumber Price index calculated by Contract Lumber, a distributor in the Midwest and Southeast, hovered around $950 per thousand board ft—more than three times the company’s annual composite index of $300 in 2019. The average through March, in the words of company blogger Don Dyson, was “an absurd $888 per thousand board feet—and likely to climb.”

According to ENR’s recent cost data，它仍然在攀登。截至5月，胶合板同比增长89.5％。总体而言，同一时期的木材价格上涨了88.6％。

Pick Up The Lumber Before It’s Gone

Supply shortages at the retail level seem to be everywhere.

New Jersey builder Mark Seligsohn knows the frustration of telling a client there will be a wait for a multi-family home to be completed. The owner of Selco Builders in Margate, he searches for his lumber anywhere he can at the South Jersey shore and picks it up himself at the lumber yard.

“我想在别人购买它之前得到它，”塞利格索（Seligsohn）最近将木木板抬到卡车后部时说道。

On a recent 90° day, Seligsohn drove his pickup truck from a jobsite in Margate inland to Pleasantville to pick up 20 sheets of drywall and plywood as well as two dozen 2x4 and 2x8 boards.

“People talk that we the builders are making more money but that’s not so,” says Seligsohn. “It’s making it hard for us to finish a house and we make the same even though we pay more for the lumber.”

Commonly used products, such as pine 2x4s (S4S), and 5/8-in.-thick plywood, are both up close to 90% in the past year, according to ENR cost data. The 2x4s are at $1,207 per thousand board-ft while the plywood hit $1,173 per thousand sq ft.

这些类型的数字引发了相关的总承包商和全国房屋建筑商协会的警报。NAHB表示，木材价格上涨的价格增加了平均新单户住宅的价格35,000美元。AGC表示，自去年春季以来，木材价格几乎已经三倍。尽管协会敦促国会和白宫对加拿大木材的关税减轻关税，但拜登政府最近提议将它们翻倍，以加入许多加拿大软木木材。AGC还希望拜登政府敦促国内木材生产商提高生产。

Explanations for Skyrocketing Prices

Seligsohn said he had finished a construction project recently using ¾-in, AdvanTech for subflooring. It cost $24 a sheet last year, he said, but now is up to $64.

Seligsohn说，需求超过了供应。“这不是制造的短缺。”

新泽西州普莱森特维尔市彼得·木材（Peter Lumber）总裁本·彼得（Ben Peter）也引用了供应和需求，并将劳动力短缺归咎于木材工厂。结果，他与核心客户的日常工作让他“在电话上让他们知道价格方面发生了什么”。

“我们只是预期大流行后,这个would fall off and prices would go back to normal," he said. "But it hasn’t and I don’t know when it will.”

James Kirby, president of Commercial Construction Consulting in Boston and a construction price expert, believes that a shortage of delivery drivers to truck the lumber from fabricators to dealers is a factor. “Trucking right now is the big problem,” he said. “Everything in the supply chain is not back to where it was before the pandemic.”

其他人则看到工作中的黑暗力量。

在杰克逊Mis在联邦法院提起诉讼s., three state homebuilders—David B. Turner Builders, New England Construction and Timber Craft Homes—are taking aim at the lumber industry’s 10 largest supply companies, claiming they have conspired to raise prices.

The builders make their case around what they contend is highly unusual pricing behavior they discovered after finding prices last November suddenly tripled. They say they went around to dealers and to Lowe's and Home Depot stores in the Jackson area to determine what was going on, but they found no explanation.

But that month, oriented-strand wafer board had shot up from $8 per sheet to $38.50, and 2x4x12 pine board, recently $7, was now $15.

Only a coordinated market manipulation in violation of antitrust laws could explain it, the lawsuit states.

“Defendant likely had to confirm with each other in some capacity because each of these Defendants prices grew at least 10 times the typical cost at the SAME TIME,” the contractors claim.

在没有提出更具体证据的情况下，承包商声称价格上涨是被告共同采取行动的结果，“必须有股票占据这些被告中的每一个。”

诉讼称10家公司为被告，包括佐治亚州太平洋和汉普顿分支机构。两家公司的发言人拒绝对诉讼发表评论。

Kirby, however, said market manipulation is unlikely and traces the current price spike origins to before the pandemic. He sees the increases continuing until an expected leveling occurs by year's end as the supply chains and other market conditions return to normal.

But Kyle Little, chief operating officer at Sherwood Lumber, a New York-based wholesale distributor and former lumber trader, was not so sanguine. “Our belief is that this cycle that we’re currently in ... is here for the foreseeable future,” he said in an interview broadcast on CNBC.

这有望使Sasson和他的Nyack Project的生活变得复杂。由于其地震要求和“精心设计”和便利设施，Sasson不得不订购比平时更具工程的木材产品 - 包括层压式贴面木材，工程的桁架托梁和结构性胶合板。根据萨森（Sasson）的说法，“工程木材要贵得多。”

Contract Lumber的Don Dyson写道：“与生活中的其他事物”一样，木材价格更为复杂，每种专业产品都具有自己的定价动态，其中包括原材料成本，交付，需求和位置。新利18备用官网登录

Back at the Gateway Lofts jobsite in Nyack, Sasson’s project manager was keeping an eye one recent afternoon on carpenters framing another level of the building.

项目经理坐在SUV的驾驶员座位上，将办公室号码打入了他的智能手机，告诉Sasson的儿子，记者有兴趣与他们谈论木材价格。项目经理通过要求层压木材木材的请求结束了电话，这是一种用于墙螺柱，桁架，桁架和其他建筑物组件的工程复合产品，因为其强度。

“We need more LSL,” he said.

Sasson, who heads Sasson Real Estate Group, has been developing and building north of New York City for 40 years. He is buoyant about prospects for his Nyack apartment project, a special amenity-filled residence with unusually spacious units. He hopes to finish by early spring.

On the subject of LSL, however, Sasson turned a bit glum. He has had more than the usual headaches ordering plywood and wall studs, the main problem, of yellow pine or laminated strand lumber: “LSL we have to get on special order. It takes forever.”

该故事的文字已更新了6/8/2021，以反映千平方英尺的胶合板的适当价格。