The carpenter Reinhard Riedhofer from Oberpframmern had to have one or the other unpleasant conversation in the past few weeks.
Teach your customers that their order will be more expensive.
“I've never seen this shortage in 20 years of work,” he says.
We're talking about wood.
District
- Over the past year, especially the past winter, the wood price has risen massively. Above all, the industrially manufactured products such as glued wood or the KVH structural timber, which is popular with architects, made of glued beams with a standard length of 13 meters, which arrives in front of Riedhofer's carpentry by articulated truck. “Endless wood” is what the Pframmern carpenter calls it, but only with an eye to the design.
In terms of availability, the material is far from endless.
He estimates that it takes around 14 days for Riedhofer to have the beams for a roof structure in the courtyard.
At the moment it's more like eight to ten weeks.
And the price for the KVH almost doubled within a year - to 450 to 500 euros per cubic meter instead of around 230 euros previously.
So Riedhofer had to teach his customers that their house roof structure would be 1000 euros more expensive in April because otherwise his calculation from January would no longer work out.
Most of them would have reacted understandingly.
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Riedhofer: "We worked through."
© Stefan Rossmann
The jump in wood prices is likely to put some building owners in trouble, especially since the costs of steel, insulation materials and PVC pipes are skyrocketing - in principle, the entire range of materials that a construction site needs.
In addition, there is the long waiting time that messes up the interlinking of the trades.
When it comes to glued wood, however, things get really down to business, carpenter Riedhofer observes price jumps every week.
Two reasons for the jump in prices
Werner Fauth, board member of the Ebersberg Forest Owners Association (WBV), has identified two main reasons for this. First of all: there is more than enough wood growth in the Ebersberg district. Fauth calculates that the private forest owners alone with their around 13,000 hectares produce three times what the sawmills in the district can process. Not counting the biggest player on the local market, the state forest.
But the renewable raw material is in great demand far beyond the district, the national border, and even the continent: China and above all the USA are in massive demand for building materials.
Presidential stimulus packages are causing a construction boom among the Americans, while supplies from neighboring Canada are halting due to political upset from the Trump era and a beetle plague in the local forests.
The customers in the USA are financially strong and, as Fauth and Riedhofer explain, just as little picky as the Chinese, when the wood is discolored because of beetle infestation.
“It doesn't work without exports,” says Fauth.
But at the moment there is no wood in front of the hut at home.
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Fauth: "This phase may be beneficial."
© Stefan Rossmann
But that is still due to a second factor, according to the head of the forest owner: The wood industry, which produces standardized mass products such as KVH or OSB panels from glued wood, allowed itself an "art break" in the corona pandemic, as Fauth puts it.
That was not because of the drop in orders, but because some large companies preferred to “take” the state short-time work allowance and empty their warehouses instead of producing according to demand.
A state-subsidized shortage of materials, so to speak.
Hope to rethink
“We worked through it,” says carpenter Reinhard Riedhofer about his five-person team.
He and the forest owner Fauth hope that the current shortage will lead to a rethink and that the building owners in the region will again be able to use solid wood from the local sawmill instead of standardized industrial products.
“This phase is perhaps a little healing,” says Fauth.
He suspects that supplies and prices will relax again by the fourth quarter of the current year.
Zimmerer Riedhofer is not so sure about that.
He says: "I cannot imagine that it will go back to 2020 level."
By the way: Everything from the region is now also available in our new, regular Ebersberg newsletter.
