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After a year and a half of price spikes, Mike Dishberger said it’s been good to see lumber prices declining.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. In late June, early July, the prices started going down and they've pretty much gone back and stabilized, probably the prices we were paying last June and July,” said Dishberger, the co-owner and CEO of Sandcastle Homes Inc. in Houston.
“So it's not back to where it was before, but it's back down significantly,” he told Houston Daily. “I always use the plywood example, which was $50 a sheet. It's at around $13 right now.”
Dishberger has never witnessed such a spike in lumber prices.
“Never that run up, that high,” he said. “I've seen prices go up but never, never like that. It's just that was just craziness.”
The big question is was that one-year aberration because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
“The market is up around the country,” Dishberger said. “The sale of homes across the country is always going to keep pushing, keeping the price up. There's a tendency to start a lot of homes in the spring because up north it thaws and people start building again and start using lumber and it'll go back up again. I don't think it will go back up to where it was before, like it was in May and June of this year.”
He said one clear sign of stability is that builders have stopped adding price escalation clauses to their contracts. They had to do so earlier this year, Dishberger said, because they couldn't keep up with lumber prices.
“The lumber is the No. 1 expense in building a home,” he said. “I do not see that again among the builders I know.”
In addition to the price stabilization, the volume of lumber is no longer a concern, either, although some special products, such as James Hardie siding, are in short supply.
“The problem is there's shortages of certain items like Hardie siding. In Houston we use tons of Hardie siding,” Dishberger said. “There is a big shortage of that. And so everyone's looking, I'm looking and I've actually switched over to another brand just to keep my homes going to have siding for them. It could be some small, small things, but Hardie’s by far the biggest one.”
He said the siding, which is highly durable and yet still attractive, is especially popular in coastal climates. Dishberger said it’s used in 90% of Houston area projects.
It’s an example of the constant need to stay on changes in the industry, he said.
Dishberger was named the 2016 Texas Builder of the Year, the 2008 Greater Houston Builders Association Houston Builder of the Year, and the 1989 Bay Area Builder of the Year.
He served on the National Association of Home Builders’ board of directors, and was president of the Greater Houston Builders Association in 2011. He also is an area vice president for the Texas Association of Builders from 2015-18; was the chair of the GHBA Government Affairs Committee, a member of the University of Houston real estate advisory board, and as president of Bay Area Builders in 1991.
Dishberger has been with Sandcastle Homes since 1996, and has been in the building industry for 38 years after leaving the U.S. Army with the rank of captain.
Dishberger earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Texas A&M University and a master's of business administration from the University of Houston. He also received a graduate master builder designation from the National Association of Home Builders.