Shortages of materials, delivery problems, rapidly rising prices: the construction industry, which is actually booming, is currently very worried. Because steel, wood and insulation materials have become considerably more expensive and scarce this year due to delivery bottlenecks in the pandemic. Craftsmen and their customers who urgently need construction timber suffer from the high wood prices. An online wood exchange in Münsterland wants to help them in particular – local marketing very directly. Forest farmer Herrmann Laurenz, 1st chairman of the Münsterland Forestry Association, provides information: “That the prices last autumn rose from 50 cents – I’m referring to the roof batten – to over 2 euros. And roof batten is a common example. And that is also with other timber. And then suddenly the market was empty. People didn’t have to plan 14 days, but weeks, months in advance in order to get wood availability at all. And of course we wanted that as a local supplier as forest farmers prevent the local, regional craftsman from covering his needs and thus being able to continue to understand his planning and processing regional wood for himself for the next few weeks, months. ” The association initiated the online platform as a provider. Sick trees would be felled, which then went to regional interested parties, to craftsmen, sawmills or roofers. The pest infestation of forests in Europe and Canada as well as export restrictions lead to rising prices and a shortage of wood – especially since other countries pay significantly more for sawn timber, a lot is exported. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that in 2020 some sawmills in this country shut down in the Corona crisis and the remaining companies cannot cope with the skyrocketing demand. The response on the customer side is correspondingly positive, according to Schreiner Markus Holtmann. In the new auctions he has the advantage of having a direct overview of what is currently on the market and directly available. “And the customers definitely take it very well that one or the other can be offered that the new plank floor, the new staircase stood on the edge of the forest, in which the forest was. Sometimes we also get the lengths – and latitude delivered directly with it, so that the customer, purely theoretically, might even be able to visit the old tree trunk again. ” The company NLF, natural materials and service center for land and forest, is a partner of the wood exchange. Franz Reppenhorst sees a future market in the platform. “I think we can all see that more and more markets are being digitized. And I think we shouldn’t ignore it when it comes to wood. We’re moving with the times and are building open and transparent markets to which everyone has access And that we will still have a certain growth there, we are already assuming. ” The responsible forester Georg Berkemeier supports the local marketing and points out that the damaged trees can be replaced with new ones in a targeted manner. “We have of course currently had a problem in the spruce, but we not only have the spruce, we also have other tree species that have a problem, and our strategy is that we want to expand the forest, and that too It is of course also important that we market wood in order to light up our forests here and there, in order to bring new tree species into the forest. ” The new, digital and regional wood exchange could help to position the forest more broadly.