Export log prices have recovered from June’s fall to sit in the early NZ$120s a JAS cubic metre for A-grade shorts, in a winter trough that bottomed just 5 per cent below the market’s 12-month average, the mildest in four years. That is according to Marcus Musson, the chief operating officer of Stand Forestry, whose market column published on Friday suggests August prices will be higher as freight, fuel, and exchange rates move in the industry’s favour.
Each winter floor has come in shallower than the last, at 5 per cent under the average this year, compared with 8 per cent in 2025, 10 per cent in 2024, and 25 per cent in 2023, in a market that traditionally bottoms out in the third quarter. Musson reads the run with caution, warning that the year is only just past halfway and shocks can still come from anywhere.
“Let’s hope that light is not a train,” Musson wrote of the flicker now showing at the end of the industry’s tunnel, in a column that counts every major input moving the right way. Shipping is expected to fall from the mid US$40s to the high $30s a cubic metre this month, the New Zealand dollar sits at a seven-month low near 56 US cents, and sales prices in China are expected to gain a couple of dollars.
It comes as Stats NZ counted 39,737 new homes consented in the year to May 2026, a 19 per cent jump that ends three straight years of decline, a demand signal Musson notes is still 25 per cent below the boom of 2021 and 2022.
“Consent numbers remain below the record peak reached in 2022,” Michelle Feyen, the agency’s economic indicators spokesperson, said of a recovery running strongest in Auckland and Canterbury, where annual consents climbed 22 and 30 per cent.
Supply is heading the other way, with southern North Island mills running day to day for logs due to wet weather and thin production bite. South Island sawmillers, meanwhile, are fielding stronger lumber orders since Carter Holt Harvey shut its Eves Valley sawmill near Nelson with the loss of more than 140 jobs.
The closure caps a two-year contraction that has stripped 570 jobs from New Zealand wood processing, and left flood-hit Tasman, holding between 3,500 and 6,000 hectares of windfall timber, with one fewer mill to process it. Musson expects the pinch to persist, with the national harvest tipped to tighten over the coming years as forests recover from major wind damage.
Whatever the second half brings will be priced in China, which takes 55 per cent of New Zealand’s forestry exports, a trade carrying $3.4 billion of logs and poles a year, and where weak Chinese housing has weighed on radiata demand since the building boom broke.
The call is the first Musson has published since PF Olsen and Forest360 unveiled the Stand Forestry brand in June, completing a merger first confirmed in December that created New Zealand’s largest independent forestry manager, with 480,000 hectares for more than 1,000 clients on both sides of the Tasman.
Winter’s turn follows a bruising first half, with diesel up 80 per cent and shipping into China up 36 per cent squeezing exporters in March, before weak Chinese furniture demand trimmed A-grade premiums through autumn.
