Builders FirstSource and the US Truss Manufacturing Market

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I'm an investor, and I'm looking to learn more about the truss manufacturing industry. In particular, I would like to better understand the economics of moving from a manual factory towards more automated versions, especially robotics. But I think a good place to start is understanding how large the truss manufacturing industry is in the US. How many players are in the market, who are the largest manufacturers? I know it's a difficult question because the industry is pretty opaque, but any high-level insights you can offer would be great.

When we sold Trussway to Builders FirstSource, we did some digging to estimate the market size. We figured out it's about $2 billion in terms of market size, which might only be for multifamily. If you include single-family, I think it's as large as $8 billion.

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I was going to say, if we're spreading $10 billion across 150 plants, that's almost $70 million per plant. That seems pretty large per plant. Okay. Truss manufacturing has been around since at least the seventies. I think the industry has largely adopted offsite manufacturing of trusses compared to stick building. But at this point, what percent of homes in the US do you think are using offsite fabrication versus stick building?

It's still very small. Call it 30% to 40% maybe. When we looked at it back in 2016, it was as low as 20%. So there's been some additional penetration in the market, but the framers like to control the truss aspect of it because it's part of their materials. To cut them out, you'd have to figure out a whole encompassing replacement solution for the framer. They're just not willing to give up those revenue dollars to the GC or anyone else. That's what's made offsite manufacturing and some of these CLT projects really difficult to pencil because framers don't want to touch it as it gobbles into their own business.

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I'm more focused on the production builder side of things. It sounds like that customer base doesn't have too much of a collaborative component. It seems like a pretty short, one-month thing. So, how sticky do you think the relationships are between a production builder and a truss manufacturer? Would it be easy for that production builder to move their business to another manufacturer?

But when you develop that relationship for accuracy and quality, the manufacturing process quality is key. Once you put the trusses up, you won't notice a problem until the HVAC guy and the electrical guy get in there. If you have to go back to the truss guy to redo trusses, that's expensive work. Yes, they can change it, but if they have a good relationship, they know the design is accurate, and the quality of the truss when it's manufactured is good, then they're going to be pretty sticky.

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