(Nation's Building News) Barely beginning to emerge from the most devastating housing downturn since the Great Depression, home builders in the early months of this year have been confronted by a significant run-up in lumber prices.

For the week ending on Feb. 19, the Random Lengths composite index stood at $317 per 1,000 board feet, its highest level since the first half of July 2006. That price was up more than 26% from the start of this year, when framing lumber was averaging $251.

During the first half of 2009, the index fluctuated around the $200 mark, before moving into the $250 range in late November.

(Random Lengths' composite index is a weighted average of 15 softwood lumber product prices.)

With the index registering declines in the past two weeks, NAHB Senior Economist Bernard Markstein said that home builders may have seen the worst of climbing lumber prices, at least for the short term.

(Washington Post) The Obama administration announced Monday [March 1] that borrowers with little or no equity in their homes will have another year to take advantage of a refinancing program that so far has made little progress.

The Home Affordable Refinance Program was set to expire in June, but so far it has reached fewer than 200,000 of the up to 5 million borrowers federal regulators hoped it would help.

Market conditions have not changed significantly since the program was launched last year, Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a statement. So to give lenders more time to implement the plan and to "support and promote market stability," the initiative will be extended to June 2011, he said.

(SustainableBusiness.com) During a visit to a technical school in Savannah, Georgia on Tuesday, President Obama announced the initiatives for HOMESTAR, a program that would offer incentives for people to make their homes more energy-efficient.

The President explained that the new program will save families several hundred of dollars on utilities, make the economy less dependent on fossil fuels, create work for small businesses and contractors, and bring back construction jobs.

In his State of the Union address, Obama called on Congress to pass a program of incentives for homeowners who make energy efficiency investments in their homes. The Senate Democratic leadership included a proposal of this kind as part of their Jobs Agenda released in February.

The president's proposal for the program is similar to the Cash for Clunkers program. Consumers would be eligible for direct HOMESTAR rebates at the point of sale for a variety of energy-saving investments in their homes. A broad array of vendors, from small independent building material dealers, large national home improvement chains, energy efficiency installation professionals and utility energy efficiency programs (including rural utilities) would market the rebates, provide them directly to consumers and then be reimbursed by the federal government.

(BusinessWeek) Billionaire Warren Buffett said the U.S. residential real estate slump will end by about 2011, predicting that's how long it will take demand for homes to catch up with the supply.

"Within a year or so, residential housing problems should largely be behind us," Buffett wrote Feb. 27 in his annual letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "Prices will remain far below 'bubble' levels, of course, but for every seller or lender hurt by this there will be a buyer who benefits."

The worst housing decline since the Great Depression has left one in five U.S. mortgage holders owing more than their houses are worth. Record foreclosures last year flooded a real estate market already glutted with unsold property, causing new construction to fall to the lowest in at least 50 years. The fall in homebuilding is the only fix unless the U.S. decides to "blow up a lot of houses," Buffett joked.

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