March 4, 2019 Freres Lumber’s Mass Plywood Panel (MPP) is an affordable mass timber product that is gaining worldwide acceptance as a safe, high performance, and environmentally sound building material. This veneer-based product can be produced up to 12-feet wide, 48-feet long, and 12-inches thick, allowing...
February 24, 2019 Currently, the commodity panel markets continue to struggle with the effects of wet and wintry weather throughout a great deal of the country. The inability to build any shipping volume and rhythm in the field, directly correlates to the amount of new purchasing that...
February 15, 2019 Over the past few weeks, Freres Lumber Company’s Mass Plywood Panel received patents and passed fire safety testing, putting it on course to be the only mass timber panel constructed entirely from Structural Composite Lumber (SCL). MPP Receives Patents in the United States...
February 11, 2019 Wood Products Industry Affected by a Drag in Housing Starts Housing starts experienced a very real slow down in the last half of 2018 which has had dramatic effects on the wood products industry. However, the slowdown has largely been exaggerated. In fact housing...
January 28, 2019 The Western Plywood market has been decent so far this year, but unspectacular. As with any winter trading in commodities, the market trends are a mixed bag due to the ebb and flow of winter weather across the country. Buyers remain cautious, but...
January 14, 2019 Wood product markets began to show marked improvement as we ended 2018. The end of 2018 can best be categorized as a slow bleed, with product prices dropping across the board. Even good news for wood products markets didn’t slow the downward trajectory...
January 11, 2019 A new year is upon us, and it is customary to contemplate what lies ahead for Freres Lumber in 2019. We have many things to be thankful for, and we think there is much opportunity ahead of us in the next 12 months. Markets There...
December 31, 2018 Surprisingly, December turned out to be a great sales month, with winter plywood sales filling the depleted inventories that distributors have allowed to shrink over the last seven months. Yes, remarkable, but true. The brutal summer and fall commodity markets took their toll on...
December 10, 2018 Wood products prices have been declining relentlessly over the last couple of months, regardless of the product. While lumber led the way initially, panel prices declined to price lows that have not been seen for three years. For example, ½” 4-ply CDX, the...
December 3, 2018 The many benefits of engineered wood products are being touted in scientifically based environmental reports and the continual struggle against poor forest management that results in catastrophic fires. Large wildfires, like those recently plaguing California, not only have disastrous effects on people, animals, air...