Lumber firm Weyerhaeuser is betting on a strong housing market for years, CEO says

Weyerhaeuser CEO Devin Stockfish told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Friday the lumber company believes the U.S. housing market will remain strong for years ahead, even after the pandemic helped fuel a surge in homebuying.

“First and foremost, it all goes back to the level of underbuilding that we’ve been doing in the U.S., really going back to the last Great Recession,” Stockfish said, referring to the industry’s historically low housing output.

Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser, which owns or controls 11 million acres of timberland in America, makes lumber products that are essential in building homes, giving Stockfish insights into market conditions both presently and in the future.

“When you think about normalized housing over any historical period, really coming out of ’08, ’09, 2010, we’ve really been building well below that level for a significant amount of time. … We think there’s a lot of pent-up demand,” the executive said in a “Mad Money” interview.

The housing market heated up dramatically during the Covid pandemic, and the sharp rise in home prices fueled some concerns that another bubble was forming or, at least, that a marked slowdown was on the other side.

While recently there have been some signs of cooling, Stockfish said demographic trends will help support the market over the next decade. Specifically, he pointed to the wave of millennials who are reaching stages of their life when homebuying becomes a priority.

Stockfish said that fact, combined with the underbuilding, “gives us a lot of confidence that we’re going to have to build a lot of homes here over the next five or 10 years to house the demand level that we have here in the U.S.”