Nearing the end of its journey, the log being tracked by The Vancouver Sun, as lumber processed by West Fraser in British Columbia, heads to US Eastern Seaboard

Audrey Dixon

VICTORIA, British Columbia , September 20, 2013 (Times Colonist) – It's a quiet day on the floor of the West Fraser sales office.

The lumber market, after making spectacular gains earlier in the year on the recovery of the U.S. housing market, has pulled back. Builders and wholesalers have built up their inventories and are no longer panicking to get enough lumber for the summer season.

Lumber prices can be volatile, and when they spiked earlier in the year, the veteran traders at West Fraser knew better than to expect them to stay that way. Recovering markets do not follow a straight line up, Joe Heath, general manager of North American sales, had said during the heady days six months ago.

Now, as we follow our log from the forest to the sawmill, it is the traders in this open-air office within a stone's throw of the mill who will decide where it goes from here.

The sales office is where the price of lumber is set for the day, and major forest companies all have sales offices like West Fraser's with a dozen traders at their desks, talking to customers, shouting the price on a sale they just made, or maybe just waiting for the phone to ring. The sale is a negotiation. There is no set price for a railcar load of Interior construction lumber.

"It can be high-pressure. It is a commodity market," said Matt Tobin, sales manager for North American lumber at West Fraser.

No business like it

Keta Kosman, who publishes one of the trade journals that traders follow, Madison's Lumber Reporter, said there is no business like it. From the harvest to the final user, there are so many variables.

"From actually putting a nail though a board in a house in the U.S. to the guy who fires up the feller buncher in an Interior forest, there are so many things that have to happen. So many variables," she said.

Traders always have an eye on the log yard, she said, when they plan what they expect to be selling in the future.

The logging season does not mesh with the homebuilding season, and both sellers and buyers have to gauge the weather to plan their inventories. The buyer and seller are often thousands of kilometres apart.

Availability of rail cars, floods and hurricanes in the marketplace, or a soggy wet spring in the bush can affect both the price and volume of sales. And, Kosman added, there's always the economy.

The price varies not only from day to day but from customer to customer, depending on the conditions attached to the sale, Kosman said.

Relationships traders have with their customers are also important, Kosman said. Customers often phone weekly, requiring specific orders.

At West Fraser, trader Todd Buhrke explained how it works: In the openspace office, traders call out when they make sales, and everyone else then knows a railcar load of a specific dimension of lumber has been sold, the price it went for, and which list of products it was sold from. They can then strike it off their lists.

In a hot market, the traders can talk among themselves about pushing the price up. In a slow market, it is the buyers applying pressure to push it down. It can take several back-andforth calls to make a deal.

Across the floor from Buhrke, trader George Boyd's phone rings. A customer wants lumber and Boyd's list shows that the Quesnel sawmill, where our log was processed, has what the customer wants in the yard. It's ready to be shipped. The price is set. The deal is closed.

The lumber is heading by rail to Buffalo, N.Y., where West Fraser operates a reload centre, essentially a lumber yard that's closer to the major U.S. housing markets.

Our log has made its way through West Fraser's Empire of Wood and now is ready to leave the country.

The lumber from it will be stored as inventory in Buffalo, ready to move out on a moment's notice for the summer building season on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. The next hands to touch it will likely be those of an American carpenter, firing nails into it from a pneumatic gun, raising the wall frame he has made from it into position and hammering it into place.

It will be a new home, sheltering an American family.

And on the Cariboo Plateau, the cycle will begin again as a silvicultural crew plants another crop of seedlings to replace it.

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