Devin Stockfish: Sure. Well, I’ll give you an update on our operations, specifically and then mention more or less the impact that it had on pricing in the market. So in terms of the impact to us, we had two of our three mills in Alberta that were impacted. We had a lumber mill and our OSB mill that both had to take about two weeks downtime each as the fires caused evacuations in those local communities. And so the net impact to us from a financial standpoint was relatively minor, sub $4 million for the quarter. I think the bigger impact, though, as you mentioned, was just with all of the fire activity, it did cause some concern around supply, particularly, I think on the lumber side. And I suspect that was part of what drove some of the pricing activity to the upside in lumber as we got into June and early parts of July.
So I think the real impact was on the overall lumber market and just kind of the concerns around supply availability with the fires. I would say from a transportation standpoint, it did obviously have some impact but I would say, not material.
Kurt Yinger: Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. And then just two quick ones. First, could you talk about what you’re hearing and seeing in terms of European lumber imports into the U.S. kind of for the back half of the year as well as on the timberland side, the pipeline of opportunities that you see and just kind of your outlook in terms of potential additional bolt-on or larger scale transactions going forward?
Devin Stockfish: Sure. Well, with respect to European lumber, we certainly saw a higher-than-normal amount of volume coming in late last year, early part of this year. Ordinarily, I would say, European lumber volumes don’t have a meaningful impact on the market. I do believe earlier in the year with the amount of volume that was coming in, particularly on the East Coast, it probably did have some impact on the supply-demand dynamic and probably push pricing down just a bit. We’ve seen the volumes of imports really starting to wane here over the last several months, which makes sense as the lumber prices have come down, it’s less economically viable for some of that wood to come to the U.S. So our expectation is we will see lower volumes.
I think you’ll still have some degree of European volume coming into the market as many of those producers want to maintain that supply chain and give them the ability to flex depending on what’s going on here versus in Europe but I suspect it will be a lower volume coming in for the back half of the year. As we think about the M&A market on the timberland side, as you probably have noticed, it’s been lighter this year than it has been over the last few years. I think last year, you probably saw in the neighborhood of $5 billion of transaction activity. We’re certainly trending much lower than that this year. And that’s really, I think largely a function of A, probably some pull forward from last year, a pretty heavy year. I think there’s probably a piece of this, too, that as the market is trying to figure out how to price carbon and ESG options in this space, perhaps some are holding out with the view that prices are going to continue to go up.
So we’ll see what the back half looks like, but we’re expecting it to be a lighter year this year than it has. We’re always in the market. That being said, as you saw with the Mississippi transaction. We’ll continue to look at every deal that comes to market. We’ll continue to have conversations with parties to see if we can do deals outside of the auction process. It’s a competitive market, but I think there will be properties where we’re very well suited to make those acquisitions and deliver returns for our shareholders.
