With the rising prices in groceries, fuel and more, the higher costs have left consumers digging deeper into their pockets, but there is some good news on the horizon, retail lumber prices are expected to drop significantly. 

We spoke with Scott Westrum, owner-operator of Westrum Lumber to see what trends he’s been noticing. 

“Our retail prices have been dropping probably since lumber peaked in March, it's been slowly dropping ever since then; it takes a little time to go from the wholesale level to the retail level, now some of the values are different between the products, some come down quicker and others slower depending on supply and demand, but they’re certainly going in the right direction, that’s for sure,” said Westrum. 

We asked Westrum if he had noticed customers holding back on purchases due to the previously rising costs. 

“A lot of customers were holding back, but they were also finding that a lot of the associated products were also going up, so anytime the lumber was coming down, other products were going up in price, so the savings that they were going to realize by waiting were somewhat minimized by some of the other products going up, so a lot of people went ahead and booked their projects,” shared Westrum. 

Westrum shared with us what kind of price drops we can expect to see. 

“There’s a lot of percentages being thrown around out there, we probably never bought anywhere close to the highest to what lumber got to, the highest prices were January, February and March which isn’t a big buying period for us, so we missed out on a lot of the higher end prices,” said Westrum.  “When people are thinking prices are coming down 70 to 80 percent, those high prices never really made it into the retail side of things anyways, it’s not going to go down as much as people think but it certainly is going down 40 to 50 percent in some cases.” 

Consumers can expect to see price reductions continue into August and September.