By: MORGAN CHILSON
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Building a new house in today’s market doesn’t yet mean extra dollars for lumber or manufactured wood products, but Kansas building supply managers warn that tariffs have driven up other construction costs.
While on-again, off-again tariffs on Canadian timber are currently off, Kansans should prepare to pay more for just about everything else in the house, they said.
“You take the hardware and the millwork portion of our business, and we’re getting daily price increases because a lot of that product is imported from China, some from South America,” said Jay Robinson, manager of Wichita’s Mill Creek Lumber and Supply Co. “The import steel business has been affected. It’s up about 15 to 18% over the last 45 days, and we’re getting pretty much daily price updates. Fasteners, nails, screws, products for building connectors, have all seen 20 to 25% price increases.”
Hardware, like doorknobs and door hinges, is up 20 to 25%, he said.
Travis Daniels, general manager at McCray Lumber and Millwork in Topeka, agreed.
“It’s hardware items. It’s things that are not manufactured domestically or from Canada, because so far, the Canadian government, the American government, keep flexing their muscles, and nothing really has happened yet,” he said.
In fact, Robinson said, lumber right now is at the lowest price it’s been in several years.
“The framing lumber composite is actually back to where it was in 2023,” he said, a price drop that he attributed to Canadian producers and American companies shifting as much product across the border as they could in anticipation of tariffs.
But Daniels said he is concerned that Canada’s recent election, which gave Mark Carney the Liberal Party win, might have an impact on lumber.
“I’m concerned that may be setting us next up on a collision course,” he said. “I think that’s how he got elected, because he said he’ll draw the hard line against the Americans. The thing is, Canadian lumber does have some other places they can export to.”
Eyes open
The construction industry will closely watch the tariff situation, said Sean Miller, executive officer of the Kansas Building Industry Association. It’s important that Canadian lumber and concrete from Mexico continue to be exempted from tariffs, he said.
“Canada is the source of upwards of 80% of our lumber, so that’s a huge issue for the homebuilding industry in particular,” he said. “There is a 14.5% tariff on lumber, pretty consistent through the last couple of administrations. That lumber was exempted from any additional tariffs at this time, and that’s really critical for us.”
Jay Robinson, manager at Wichita Mill Creek Lumber and Supply Co. (Submitted)
Miller said possible supply chain disruptions are also a concern.
“We’ve seen so much, starting really with COVID, and it’s never really come back the way we would have liked it,” he said. “That can really impact us.”
As an example, he said electrical transformers can be challenging to source for larger developments, such as 20- or 50-house projects.
“The ability for Evergy or your local electric partner to get the right amount of transformers really got limited during COVID, and it has not come back the way we would have liked to,” he said. “Electric companies have worked really hard to make sure those things are staged and ready.”
Robinson said tariffs have the potential to hurt the cost of projects that are in the works or already started, but most builders won’t be affected because they learned hard lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I would say pretty much 99.9% of all the builders we deal with have language in their contracts for increases due to market conditions,” he said. “A lot of builders took some pretty serious hits back in ’21, ’22, during the COVID run, when lumber prices doubled. They were not protected.”
“Unfortunately, the end user is the one that’s bearing the brunt of all these tariffs,” Robinson added.
No quick fix
As the politics of tariffs and interest rates play out, Daniels said there’s no way to quickly bring manufacturing back to the United States.
“If you’re a believer that the trade imbalance with these other countries has been tremendously unfair, not America’s favorite for years, it’s not going to fix quick,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting times.”
Robinson said he believes American lumber companies could potentially manage the country’s housing starts.
“What we’re seeing right now are curtailments with the prices as soft as they are — the mills are actually cutting production back because they’re over produced,” he said. “I’m going to say that our domestic production on framing and lumber commodity products can sustain about 1.2 to 1.3 million housing starts annually, and that’s pretty close to where we’re at today.”
Robinson said he is less familiar with what it would take for the country to keep up with hardware needs in construction, but he said that part of the industry is “heavily reliant” on imports.
Correction: Updated to show that Mark Carney won Canada’s recent election.