Draft:Madison's Lumber Reporter

Madison's Lumber Reporter is a Canadian-based weekly forest industry products guide providing softwood lumber commodity price information. The publication was established in 1952 by Peter Madison, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Madison's Lumber Reporter focuses on tracking the current market trends of North American home building and construction framing softwood lumber and panel prices. The periodical publishes its reports for 50 weeks out of the year.

History
Madison's Lumber Reporter started as an 8-page newsletter covering the various softwood species, products, sizes and grades. The first issue was September 15, 1952. In 1973 Peter Madison sold the company to Laurence Cater. Laurie and Peter worked together for five years. Over time Laurie took on Editor John Freisen and in the early 1980s Madison's hired Zara Heartwood as Market Analysis Editor. In the 1990s, Ward Johnson became Editor. By then the newsletter had grown to 12-pages, full of weekly lumber market and price data for the forest industry and the building materials industry.



In 2008, Laurence Cater retired and sold Madison's to existing staff member Keta Kosman. Four years later, Zara Heartwood retired and Earl Heath was brought on as market analysis editor. The company underwent a significant transformation in 2018 when the weekly PDF newsletter was upgraded to an interactive dashboard tool.

Lumber price data is used by the forest products industry, specifically sawmills, to determine where the market is and to make plans for their near-term future operations. It is also used by the housing construction industry, as lumber is the greatest input cost for home builders and contractors.

Published
A selection of Madison's weekly lumber prices are published (with permission) by various government agencies, as indication of the state of the forest industry. These citations include Natural Resources Canada: and the British Columbia Ministry of Forests: IE: British Columbia Forest Product Prices

Madison's lumber price data is cited by Statistics Canada Recent trends in wholesale and retail softwood lumber prices

Madison's lumber price data is cited as one input into the Statistics Canada Producer Price Index

Otherwise Madison's Lumber Reporter is cited weekly by several forest industry publishers (with permission by publisher):

Canadian Forest Industries magazine

Woodworking Network

Global Wood

Lesprom

The Working Forest

Citations in mainstream news
Madison's is frequently contacted by mainstream media as an industry expert on saw milling and the lumber market:

Lumber prices stabilize, demand for softwood remains strong

U.S. housing demand expected to drive lumber prices higher in 2024

The Word on Lumber

Academic Publishing
Madison's is co-author of a scholastic publication in the category of Forest Policy and Economics:

''Province specific impacts of the 2006 United States-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement: A seemingly unrelated regression approach''

Economics Publishing
Madison's data is used in an economics report to determine the economics of timber harvesting in Nova Scotia:

The New Brunswick primary forest products market