← All posts · May 10, 2026 · 8 min read

Picking your next lumber yard location: a 7-step framework

Opening a new lumber yard, branch, or distribution location is a 5-10 year bet. The lease or land purchase is the second-biggest cost; the operational ramp is the biggest. Get it wrong, and you spend the next decade explaining why margins are off. Get it right, and your sales team writes itself a bonus check every quarter.

Most LBM operators we work with make this decision the same way: relationship-driven (a long-time builder asked them to set up nearby), or gut-driven (a region "feels" right). Both can work. But neither scales — and neither helps when three executives are arguing about which of two finalists has more growth headroom.

Here's the framework we'd use, broken into 7 steps. None of them require expensive tools; most can be done with public data and a spreadsheet.

1Define the brief in customer terms

Before you look at any geography, write down the customer profile you want this location to serve. Specifically:

• What kind of builder? (Production, custom, small infill, single-family-only, multi-family-too?)
• What product mix? (Lumber-heavy, full-line, specialty trusses, EWPs, doors+windows?)
• What's your draw radius from a unit-economics standpoint? (Concrete plants: 30 min. Lumber: 60-90 min. Specialty: longer.)

The brief filters the universe. A location that's great for production builders is wrong for a yard that wants custom-builder relationships. Pick one. Don't both-and your way into mediocrity.

2Filter the county universe by raw volume

Pull US Census BPS data. Filter to counties with 500+ single-family permits/yr in the geography you're considering. This trims 3,000 US counties down to 200-300 worth a second look.

Sub-filter: counties with at least 1.5x the average permit volume of their state. That weeds out flat markets; concentrates on growing ones.

3Layer in builder density

For each surviving county, count the distinct active builders. A county with 5,000 permits/yr split across 200 builders is a very different market than one with 5,000 permits split across 8 builders.

Diverse-builder markets favor a yard with broad product mix and relationships. Concentrated markets favor a yard that can land 1-2 anchor builders and serve them hard.

4Drive-time candidate site analysis

Pick 5-10 candidate sites within your top 3-5 counties. Use available industrial real estate listings, or your existing real estate broker.

For each candidate, compute a 30-minute drive-time isochrone (not a radius — see why). Count the permits inside the isochrone for the last 12 months. This is your real catchment.

Compare sites side-by-side. The one with the largest drive-time catchment is the one your trucks can actually serve.

5Look at YoY momentum, not just absolute volume

A county with 3,000 permits last year and 3,500 this year is more interesting than a county with 5,000 last year and 4,500 this year — even though the absolute number favors the second one.

YoY change tells you which direction the market is moving. Markets cool. Markets heat up. You want to be where momentum is positive, even if the absolute base is smaller. Year 3 of your lease is what matters, not year 1.

6Check the builder mix against your customer thesis

For each finalist county, pull the top 20 builders. Are they the kind of builders you wrote the brief for?

• If you want production builders: look for top-3 builders pulling 100+ permits/year. Lennar, DR Horton, Pulte, KB Home — typical anchors.
• If you want custom builders: look at the long tail — many builders each doing 5-15 permits/year. The data will look more diffuse.
• If you want trade-specific (truss, doors, etc.): map the builder mix to your spec history. Production builders cycle specs annually; custom builders are spec-fluid.

7Stress-test the bottom case

Before you sign anything, ask: if this market drops 30% next year, what's our break-even?

This is the question most LBM operators skip until 18 months in. Run the unit economics on 70% of trailing-12-month permit volume. If the location still works at that level, commit. If it only works at current volume, walk.

The hardest yards aren't the ones that opened in the wrong county. They're the ones that opened in the right county but underwrote at peak. A bad year hits at the bottom of the cycle, and you've still got 7 years of lease.

Putting it together

The whole framework takes a sales team plus a real-estate broker about 2-3 weeks to work through if the data is at hand. If you're starting from scratch — pulling BPS, scraping permit portals, looking up builders — it can take 2-3 months.

PermitFocus's location analyzer runs steps 4-6 mechanically. Drop pins on your candidate sites, pick drive-time or radius, see the catchments compared side-by-side with permit volume, builder count, and top builders inside each. Steps 1, 2, 3, and 7 are still on you — they're decisions, not data lookups — but the geography and demographic work that takes weeks becomes a 10-minute exercise.