Skyrocketing lumber prices have more than tripled over the past 12 months and made the cost associated with building an average new single-family home significantly rise. The folks at Visual Capitalist dove deeper into the lumber price storm to find out how many new single-family homes $50k in lumber can build today versus the same period in 2020.
To calculate each home, Visual Capitalist used the following parameters:
- Lumber requirements: 6.3 board feet (bd ft) per square foot (sq ft)
- Median single-family house size: 2,301 sq ft
- Total lumber required per single-family house: 14,496 bd ft
What they found was that $50k in lumber in 2015 could build 14.74 new single-family homes. By April 2020, the same price of lumber could build around 10.5 homes. And in May, after a meteoric rise in lumber prices, $50k in lumber could only build 2.11 homes.
