DELTA CEDAR —Continued
DELTA CEDAR —Continued from page 47 WASHINGTON REPORT —Continued from page 18 "If mortgage rates fall below 6 [percent] in 2024, more owners will feel comfortable listing their homes for sale, alleviating some of the shortages, but not enough to close the supply gap," Maleyev said. Construction Workforce Shortage Tops 500,000 By Zachary Russell Delta Forestry Group’s new Raptor Trim Line and 80-bin sorter, at their Halo sawmill, replaced their green chain, enabling the sawmill to ramp up production. read every issue online www.softwoodbuyer.com Pictured is the new bin sorter building construction at Delta Forestry Group’s Halo Sawmill. It isn’t just the president and COO and longtime employees that share in the hope and optimism of the future of Delta, but new employees such as Rick Harris, who has spent 30 years in the forest products industry and was just recently brought on board, that recognizes the future that Delta has. “Delta has a very successful reputation and brand in and of itself and while the security of the fiber basket in British Columbia is changing, they are taking on this new landscape and continuing to grow and expand into different markets and species.” Delta Forestry Group is a member of BC Wood, North American Wholesale Lumber Association and Truck Loggers Association. For more information visit, www.deltaforesterygroup.com. • of houses for sale, which is generally supportive of prices, along with generally stable demand that is coming from things like household formation," Roger Ashworth, senior strategist on the structured credit team at Goldman Sachs, said this week. When this story was first reported, new home sales climbed up by 8 percent in December, according to government data, while prices declined to two-year lows. The fall in prices and a rise in sales was partly due to builders offering inducements to buyers, according to Yelena Maleyev, a senior economist at KPMG. "Builders have pivoted to building smaller homes and offering more discounts and concessions, such as mortgage rate buydowns, to bring in buyers sidelined by rising mortgage rates," she said in a note shared with Newsweek. But the data from the U.S. Census Bureau also showed that inventory of newly built homes fell last month after going up the previous months. There were 453,000 houses available for sale at the end of December, which accounts for 8.2 months' worth of supply. This constituted a 3.5 percent decline from the same time a year ago, Maleyev pointed out. The lack of inventory also comes at a time when the used homes market has struggled. Sales are down in that segment amid a lack of supply of homes as sellers are reluctant to give up their low rates for new home loans hovering in the mid-6 percent. This lack of supply will be key to how prices shake out and the outlook for the year is not encouraging. (The following article was first published by www.chainstoreage. com. The Associated Builders and Contractors says its model uses the historical relationship between inflation-adjusted construction spending growth, sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Value of Construction Put in Place Survey, and payroll construction employment, sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to convert anticipated increases in construction outlays into demand for labor at a rate of approximately 3,550 jobs per billion dollars of additional spending.) The construction industry's labor crunch shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. The industry will need to attract an estimated 501,000 additional workers on top of the normal pace of hiring in 2024 to meet the demand for labor, according to a proprietary model developed by Associated Builders and Contractors. Looking ahead to 2025, the industry will need to bring in nearly 454,000 new workers on top of normal hiring to meet construction demand and that’s presuming that construction spending growth slows significantly next year. “ABC estimates that the U.S. construction industry needs to attract about a half million new workers in 2024 to balance supply and demand,” said Michael Bellaman, ABC president and CEO. “Not addressing the shortage through an all-of-the-above approach to workforce development will slow improvements to our shared built environment, worker productivity, living standards and the places where we heal, learn, play, work and gather.” The U.S. construction industry unemployment rate averaged 4.6 percent for the second straight year in 2023, matching the second-lowest level on record, while job openings remained historically elevated at an average of 377,000 per month through the first 11 months of 2023. 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