The International Mass Timber Conference opens its tenth year this week in Portland. Over three days at the Oregon Convention Center, more than a hundred speakers across five tracks will cover the full supply chain — from forestry and manufacturing to design, construction, and development. It's the largest gathering of mass timber professionals in the world, and it's the one event I attend every year where the conversation moves at the speed the industry actually needs.

I'm not going for the overview sessions. I've been working with mass timber long enough that the fundamentals aren't what I'm after. What I'm watching for this year is where the conversations are shifting — specifically, whether the developer and capital questions are starting to receive the same rigor that the engineering and design questions have received for the past decade.

The Boardroom Changes the Conversation

The most significant addition to this year's program is a new keynote session called The Boardroom. Developers pitch real mass timber projects to a panel of investors — institutional capital, private equity, family offices — in front of a live audience. The panel provides feedback on underwriting criteria, risk evaluation, and return profiles.

This matters enormously. For years, the mass timber conversation at IMTC has been dominated by design innovation and structural engineering. Those conversations were necessary. The code needed to evolve, the fire testing needed to be done, and the architectural community needed to see what was possible. That work happened, and it was excellent.

But the binding constraint on whether mass timber scales is not whether architects want to use it. It's whether developers can underwrite it, finance it, insure it, and deliver it on schedule. The Boardroom puts capital engagement at the center of the conference for the first time. That's a structural shift in how the industry is thinking about growth.

Mass timber doesn't scale through better designs. It scales through better deal structures, better risk transfer, and better capital alignment. The Boardroom is the first time IMTC has built programming around that reality.

Five Questions I'm Carrying Into Portland

Every year I go to IMTC with specific questions I want answered — not from the podium, but from the conversations in the margins. The hallway conversations, the building tours, the dinners. That's where the real signal is. Here are the five questions I'm focused on this year.

1. Is the Insurance Market Moving?

I've written at length about the insurance gaps in mass timber development. The carrier market hasn't kept pace with the construction market. Premiums are inconsistent, classification varies between underwriters, and the claims history that actuarial models need simply doesn't exist yet at scale. I want to know whether any carriers at IMTC are showing signs of building dedicated mass timber underwriting capacity, or whether we're still in the one-off pricing environment that creates so much uncertainty during financing.

2. How Are Developers Handling Procurement Lead Times?

Mass timber procurement is not like ordering steel. Lead times are long, supply chains are concentrated, and the sequencing implications are different from conventional construction. I wrote about this in Construction Sequencing in Mass Timber. What I want to hear at IMTC is whether developers are getting better at integrating procurement into their pre-development timelines, or whether the industry is still catching teams off guard when they're already in design development.

3. What's the Real Enclosure Conversation?

The building enclosure is one of the most consequential technical decisions in any development project, and in mass timber it carries additional weight because of moisture sensitivity during erection. I want to see whether the contractor and construction tracks are addressing enclosure sequencing as a first-order risk variable, or treating it as a detail to be resolved in the field. The distinction matters for insurance, for schedule, and for long-term building performance.

4. Are the Capital Conversations Getting Specific?

The developer track is listed as one of five tracks this year. That's progress. But the question is whether the sessions go beyond advocacy and into operational detail. I want to hear developers talk about what actually changed in their pro forma when they chose mass timber. What did the lender require? What did the insurance cost? How did the schedule perform relative to underwriting? The industry needs case studies with numbers, not just case studies with renderings.

5. Where Is Labor Readiness?

Construction labor productivity has been declining for decades. Mass timber, in theory, requires less field labor than conventional systems because much of the work moves to the factory. But the field labor that remains is specialized — crane operations, connection detailing, moisture protection during erection. I want to know whether the workforce development conversation at IMTC is keeping pace with the construction pipeline, or whether we're heading toward a skilled labor bottleneck that could slow delivery even as demand grows.

The Sessions I'm Prioritizing

The conference runs five parallel tracks: Designs and Markets, Contractors and Construction, Supply and Supply Chain, Developer Topics, and Advanced Topics and Case Studies. I'll be spending most of my time in the Developer Topics and Contractors and Construction tracks, with selective attendance in Advanced Topics when case studies include financial performance data.

The Kengo Kuma keynote on Wednesday will be significant for the design community. Kuma's work has demonstrated what's architecturally possible with timber at a global scale. For developers, the more immediately useful keynote is The Boardroom on Tuesday afternoon — live pitches, live investor feedback, and a real conversation about what capital markets need to see before they'll underwrite mass timber at scale.

The Thursday keynote featuring Amazon and Meta exploring sustainable materials and data-driven design is worth watching for a different reason. When large technology companies start examining how construction material choices intersect with their sustainability and campus development strategies, it signals demand at a scale that could reshape procurement economics for the entire industry.

The building tours on Tuesday consistently sell out, and for good reason. Portland has a concentration of completed mass timber projects that no other North American city can match. Walking through a completed building — seeing the connections, understanding the enclosure detailing, talking to the teams who built it — provides information that no presentation deck can replicate.

What I Hope Changes This Year

My broader hope for IMTC 2026 is that the conference begins to close the gap between the engineering community and the development community. Mass timber has been an engineering-led movement for its first decade. That was appropriate. But the next decade will be determined by whether developers can make these projects pencil consistently — not just on landmark projects with patient capital, but on repeatable mid-rise multifamily and commercial projects where the margins are thinner and the timelines are less forgiving.

That means the conversation needs to shift from "can we build it?" to "can we underwrite it, insure it, finance it, and deliver it at a cost and schedule that works within conventional capital structures?" Those are development questions. They require development-level rigor. And they connect directly to the construction productivity problem that sits underneath the entire housing supply challenge.

At Durata Advisory, structuring risk before material exposure is core to how we work with development teams. Mass timber introduces specific procurement, insurance, and sequencing risks that need to be addressed at feasibility, not at closing. IMTC is where the people solving these problems gather, and the quality of those conversations will shape how quickly the industry matures.

Ten years in, the question is no longer whether mass timber works. It's whether the systems around it — capital, insurance, procurement, labor — can scale as fast as the ambition. That's what I'm watching for in Portland.

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