[ineedasername]

As the article notes, much lumber production shut down believing COVID would significantly impact demand, but that was really not the case except for a very short period of time.

In my area in particular, I live outside of a city hit hard by COVID, and that had lots of workers who could transition to WFH. The combination means that city dwellers have flocked to the local suburbs in massive quantities, often buying up the cheapest houses & either immediately expanding them or simply knocking them down completely to rebuild from scratch. As a result, not only is it difficult to find local contractors available for even minor home improvements, local property values have spiked as much as 30% over the last 14 months. This has been greatly assisted by mortgage interest rates that as incredibly low-- I just refinanced and saved about 20%/month on my mortgage and an overall $50,000 saving over the life of the loan.