Honkarakenne, holder of Honka log homes brand, has published financial results for year 2005. In short, company took a beating on two important export areas, Germany and Japan, while other markets were doing well. Turnover was nearly 80 million euros and loss bit over one million euros.

Sales to Japan fell primarily because of the weak value of yen. American log home companies now have the advantage in Japan, because dollar is not as strong as euro is when compared to yen.

Germany is totally different matter. Country is part of euro zone and currency fluctuations don’t affect the business. However, images and trends do affect. This is why Honka is in trouble. Company has been promoting the idea of ready-made homes but customers have not embraced the idea. Sales have dropped as marketing investments have supported the new business model. As a concrete example, Germany’s share of Honka sales used to be 20% but now Germany contributes with only 10%. Company is now returning back to basics and supports the sale of unique log homes and log cabins.

Russia remains an interesting market area as country’s building tradition favors massive logs. Honka happens to be an expert in log homes and cabins that are manufactured from massive pine logs. Russia’s economy is also regaining strength, therefore creating possibilities for recreational housing investments – golf courses, company getaways and accommodation cabins being high on the list.

United States gets mentioned only indirectly, “The objectives set for 2005 were met in France, other Central European market areas, and in the United States.” Read the paper at Honka investor page.

Finnish light log home manufacturer – Luoman Oy – has started to manufacture mobile homes that are made of logs. Their new product innovation is called MobileHome. These MobileHomes are suitable for year-round living and can be pulled around and for example follow you with seasons, during summer it stands as your summer cabin on the beach and during winter sports as skiing lodge at mountains.

Luoman is going to export most of their MobileHome production and they do it so that homes are shipped in pieces and assembled at destination. First produced MobileHomes are already floating on pontoons in England. This demonstrates the versatility of log-built mobile homes. If you have any questions on Luoman mobile log homes, you can contact me at my Gmail.com email address with prefix jarkko.aho and remember to add @ in between. You can also leave a comment, if you think that it is easier. Oh yes, they claim that it is the first time that mobile homes are made of logs. What do you think, is it true?

The Pacific Lumber Co is mulling the sell of tens of thousands of acres of timberland. Company says that it is concentrating on producing redwood lumber. Financial analysts seem to take announcement with a grain of salt, predicting that this is just a step towards liquidation of the company. You can read more about the matter over here.

What makes this news interesting is another similar story, U.S. government being the seller. Bush government is planning to use the proceeds to concentrate on main functions like public services, rural schooling to be exact. However, there have been some analysts and politicians who claim that sale has to be done because of poor management of public affairs. More about the topic over here.

What’s the lesson of these two stories? No matter which way you look at it, there is awfully lot of land at sale right now, go and grab some.

I have been brooding on and on the state of U.S. housing market. We saw stellar performances during year 2005, but estimations for year 2006 have been slightly less enthusiastic. We haven’t gotten to far into year 2006 and already some alarming sings are sprouting up. KB Home informs us that their orders are down and cancellations are up. This is tough situation for any company. It is not as bad as is sound though, because KB Home has massive backlog of orders that will carry it thorough most part of the year, but it remains to be seen what happens on the second half of the year.

Barna Log Homes and Hope for Chattanooga joined their forces to build a log home for a family that got hurricaned by Katrina. Barna Log Homes will provide all the material that is needed to build dry house – wall logs, windows, doors, floor, and roof system. What the house still needs are finish materials and infrastructure like water and electricity. The project will be kick started with good old log raising and everybody is invited to help.

Barna Log Homes is the biggest log home manufacturer in the United States and it is only fitting that they try to catch the log home donating publicity wave that was started by Katahdin Cedar Log Homes. Unfortunately, Katahdin gave very expensive log home for a person with slightly dubious background. In this sense, Barna Log Homes has made a cheaper decision that is unlikely to backfire. Read the news.

Vicky Sanderson wrote an article for The Star and it turned out to be very nice, you should check it too. It quickly tells the story of Pat Wolfe of Pat Wolfe Log Building School. I don’t want to ruin your reading pleasure by giving out some spoilers so I just stop here.

Japan is a good market for log home companies. Country has strong woodworking and artisan tradition, but past industrialization has stripped the country of most usable forests – usable in the sense of log home building. Nowadays, Japan is very much environment considerate and they know what devastating effects clearcutting over the mountains would have. Therefore they generally prefer to import log dwellings that fit to picturesque mountain scenery.

Many large log home manufacturers have been relying on Japanese sales for years. During the Asian economic crisis this reliance cause huge difficulties for many companies – sales plummeted. Future looks bright though, Japan is making strong economic comeback.

Some of the strongest players on this strengthening Japanese market come from Finland (amazingly). Americans have the longest business relationship with Japanese on the area of log homes, so their total volume is still hard to top. Finns have been able to shake the market because of their (or should I say our) log homes have that special Scandinavian design. Scandinavian design is notorious for its pulling power among Japanese consumers, and for that matter, among other consumers too.

Original motivator for this article came from this story, published at Vancouver Sun. Several companies (Superior Log Homes, Norse Log Homes, Ram Creek Log Homes and Big Foot Homes Inc.) are mentioned in this article and if you want to know what are their future plans, you better read the original.

Here is a link to a Japanese building material survey. You will notice that U.S. and Canada are very strong building material suppliers. Finland is usually mentioned in relation with wood materials.

Many of you might have heard of a band called The Beatles. Well, sure you have, but what about Paul McCartney? Once again, direct hit! The thing you might not know is that poor Paul has been ordered to tear down his log cabin on his southern England estate. Evidently Sir Paul didn’t sort out appropriate planning permissions to build such a cabin.

I have been in a situation, which has tied down my hands with my personal log cabin project. Now I have my back covered, I have permissions to build and no council is going to tell me that my hard work must be dismantled. Unlike Paul, I can’t afford to sauce up this project.

I ended up using special tag that tells the editor the difference between HTML and article text. I suppose that now I should go through all my previous posts to check if they are ok or not…

That was an April fools post.

Wordpress post writing editor tries to be too smart and cuts links with line transfer command, if they are too long to for one line. I guess that I have to find a way to sort this out. For now, I am afraid, most of my links on this log home site are not operational.