It’s tough when your mainstay income producing product goes into a slump,
but, that’s economics.
Building more of these would be a waste of resources (including manpower) that should be applied somewhere else as dictated by demand.
Many of the sawmills and modular home builders got into making products for the oil & gas industry during the great recession. When housing starts dropped to 500m in 2009 there was not enough demand for regular dimension products for new home construction. Now, housing starts are back to just over 1 million. They will slowly climb back up to 1.3-1.4 million over the next few years. Sawmills and lumber brokers are pretty flexible.
There was a time when every Canadian sawmill sold X percent of their production to Japan. Now almost none. Now they all sell X percent to China and Vietnam and Taiwan. We sell a lot of low grade pine boards to Pakistan and India. Ten years ago we used to import a lot of Euro spruce dimension lumber. Now there is almost none. Everything changes. Change is the only constant.