SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) – Americans are spending more time in their homes than ever before. What comes with that is the need to improve and grow those homes. Combine that with a decision to stop milling wood at the beginning of the pandemic and heightened import costs with lumber from Canada, and you arrive at some of the highest lumber costs in recent memory.
“You always see an increase after a natural disaster,” Ron Milback said, “but I can’t remember it being like this.”
Milback is one of the founders of Milback Custom Homes, a company that builds homes in and around Syracuse. According to his estimates, the cost of wood is up 196% right now from where it was about 18 months ago.
“I started noticing, ‘What’s going on with these invoices?’” Milback said. “The exact same house I just built three months ago, ‘Why is the lumber package $30,000 or $40,000 more for the same house?’”
He said he started seeing this trend progress at the end of last summer, when people began to search for homes again. A 1,700 square foot house that Milback Custom Homes would build that usually costs $260,000 could now easily run upwards of $300,000. Milback even had his own house built a couple of months ago and said he was able to justify the cost of the lumber by how low his mortgage rate was. This is the norm for a lot of his customers, too.
“But unfortunately [lumber] is a cost that we’ve passed onto our customers,” Milback said. “It’s the cost of doing business. If I didn’t increase the cost of the houses to reflect the increase in lumber costs, we wouldn’t be making money.”
Not all people that make houses can charge more though. Some people make houses for free like Andrew Lunetta, the founder of a Tiny Home For Good. The Syracuse-based non-profit makes 340 square foot homes with the goal of getting homeless people out of the shelter system.
“We can’t pass that lumber cost off to somebody else,” Lunetta said. “That is just a shot that we have to take. And the unfortunate piece is just that it’s going to be one person who can’t have a house. We would have had someone else out of the shelter system long term.”
A typical tiny home build usually costs around $40,000. Lunetta does much of the construction himself with a small team of volunteers. Now, with the elevated cost of lumber, a tiny home can run upwards of $55,000.
“Fifteen grand in a house that’s only 55 [thousand], that’s significant,” Lunetta said.
Lunetta partially blames the corporate hardware stores for stoking the home improvement flames. He said they send out promotional emails telling people to stock up on wood, which helps them justify and raise their high prices.
“Those prices just ramped up, and everyone wants to build stuff, so Lowe’s and Home Depot just jack up their prices because they know everyone is going to be there,” Lunetta said.
A Tiny Home for Good is currently building on a lot on Green Street. Lunetta initially planned to put five dwellings in the area this year, but because of lumber prices, he can only afford to build four. Two of those four are already finished.
“You know, I see our waitlist, and I can see who’s three down our waitlist, and I know that person isn’t necessarily going to be off our list this year,” Lunetta said.
