84 Lumber plans to open nine new facilities in seven Western states plus create an office in Arizona to manage its growth spurt, chief operating officer Frank Cicero revealed today.
The nation's largest privately owned full-service lumberyard plans to open two stores in the Seattle area; one around Boise, Idaho; one in the Salt Lake City area; one in the Denver area; a facility with component manufacturing capability in Las Vegas; a second store in San Antonio; and stores in Lancaster and Stockton, Calif. In addition, 84 will open an office in Arizona--probably linked to its current store in Chandler--that will serve as the Pennsylvania-based company's Western headquarters.
"That's just to get us started," Cicero told ProSales in an interview. 84 also is looking into the possibility of going into the Portland, Ore., market and may expand further in Utah. The company plans to pursue the same mix of customers--from the giants to small builders--as it does in other markets, he said.
While its 252 branches are most prevalent in the Mid-Atlantic, 84 already has 11 stores in Texas, three in California, two in Arizona, and one each in Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. It currently isn't in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or Utah.
The Lancaster and second San Antonio yards have a good chance of opening this year, Cicero said, while the rest have to go through permitting processes and such and thus won't be ready until 2017 at the earliest.
The plans help show how far 84 has recovered from the days in 2008-09, according to a Forbes article, in which the company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and had closed dozens of yards, many of them in the West. Now 84's revenues are back up to about $2.5 billion as of 2015; its January-February revenues were 25.8% over the same months in 2015, and its year-over-year revenue growth for March was even better at 35.7%, Cicero said.
