House thoughts
You know you are feeling mortal when you take a look at your 90 page living trust and identify a hole in the detailed plan - that hole revolving around what if me and my son die together or at the same time, or what would happen if I would pass, and then he would pass without a will or beneficiaries (meaning, pass young). Turns out in PA where I live, my estate would then be considered ‘intestate’, and governed by the rules of the State, the exact opposite of what all this planning is about. And here’s the thing about all you aghast at even the thought of this - there is zero correlation between planning and dying. We all go sometime - fade off into that bright light, down that long tunnel. There is no living without dying - one defines the other - one makes the concept of the other possible. Good planning is just that - good planning. And I’m a planner and give a lot of credit to good planning for making all this all possible.
Monday night gravel ride in Milford. 5 miles in, 5 mile out. My Strava failed to kick and I'm suffering from the 'if it's not Strava it didn't happen' feeling.
So, I’ve begun making a concerted effort in my iCloud email account to unsubscribe to every email that is junk or a mailing list I don’t want to receive (i.e., 85% of them) instead of just deleting them. I’ll report back in a month if it changes the volume of junk emails I get.
We push ahead on the closing of 7 new pieces of land at prices about double what I’m used to paying. That means a lot of things, but one of them is that it costs more money to buy them. Obvious, yes, in theory, until you start writing the checks and the bank account starts dropping by 6 figures at every closing instead of after 2 or 3 closings. Surveys, septics, walking the land, dreaming and envisioning what house will go where, what will the market support from a price vantage - reverse engineering the land and house package in order to back into the best play for the market at this particular time.
My home gym.
“This particular time” to me currently means there are good buyers for the right homes at the right price and that right price is elevated for something special and profitable for our bread and butter 5 acres and a cool house. Inventory remains low. Buyers remain motivated. Good houses sell. Catskill Farms resales jump off the rack (the mature landscaping after a few years of ownership post-build and general love of property all our homeowners exhibit is clear to anyone and make the properties irresistible to prospective buyers).
Came across this resale on Rivka Road - A Ranch we built and sold in 2021/2022 during the Covid go-go times. Nice house - in fact if memory serves me correctly, it was this father-daughter duo who took our one Ranch design, and stretched and tweaked it onto we had a new design, about 500 sq ft bigger, and we’ve never looked back. I think they were Airbnbing this in the end, and that game just isn’t what it used to be - low margins, lots of work, picky clientele who are looking for a special amenity. 3 or 4 bedrooms with a porch is just a hard sell in this competitive space. The $899,000 price tag is also interesting - a little lower than I would have expected, placing it solidly in the ‘profitable’ category, but by no means a grand slam. I think we originally sold it for $710k, and was one of the homes in this 16 home project that began to come close to real market value.
Out bushwhacking and scouting land.
All during Covid, our prices lagged behind the market since our deals were made 9 months before the sales date, and prices were going up 5% a month - meaning a $600,000 price tag house was north of $700k market value when we sold it. Meaning, I lost out on a ton of profit - but I was too busy to cry in my milk too much, and I’m careful, didn’t overprice, booked a ton of deals at good prices, crept my prices up house by house. What it means is nearly everyone who bought from us in 2020-2023 have hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity in their homes.
I look at some other builders and they are literally leaving their clients under water, house after house after house. Taking every nickel of value and finding a way to charge for it, wring it from their clients pocket to theirs. Through almost purposeful inefficiency. Our entire business plan revolves around being serious about time and price, and that’s actually just rare. It’s easier to jerk people around with a smile on your face and grab every unearned nickel. Someone should do a study on how much our clients have made off of Catskill Farms homes, vs the resale value of other builder’s homes.
Lulu loves our daily off-leash walks in the Bashakill.
This inadvertent design leap and tweak I mentioned 3 paragraphs ago has happened more than once - we are working with a client with a good eye, who likes one of our designs, requests some changes, requests some more changes, and boom, before you know it, you have a new floor plan. One of our favorite barn houses happened that way. More than once as well someone - a framer, plumber - someone makes a mistake that provides a view for different layout and wallah, something new. Same thing on the barn house - a framer made a mistake and the more I looked at it the more I realized the mistake could actually be a new half bath layout. That’s the advantage of me being on the sites a lot - I catch things, and I know my homes well enough that sometimes a mistake provides an opportunity.
Many times good opportunities arise as you are digging out of a mistake. The climb out of the mistake is steep, so you look for alternatives, and then there is a brand new lane to travel, and many times we never look back - the new alternative lane and route is better, more compelling. But let’s not get carried away - many times a mistake is just a mistake and you have to through a bunch of money at it to fix it.
The big house on a lake in Fremont, just north of Callicoon and North Branch, is coming along nicely and quickly.
Now that I got this all figured out, have a pretty dynamic team, have the modular pool income stream, and look back at where I was 10 years ago - another 5-10 years of this just might be doable. Although it is getting a little annoying/concerning as members of my team - suppliers, vendors - get up and retire, leave us scrambling to fill their big shoes, many times unsuccessfully. We've been replacing some with younger newer teams, but some it's hard to see replacing them with similarly talented teams.