Hybrid work and its benefit to the Catskills
Crain’s, a newspaper about NYC issues of interest to the business community, reports that just 8% of NYC workers are in the city Monday through Friday according to their most recent business survey. “Only 49% of Manhattan office workers are expected to be in their seats even after Labor Day,” they report.
That bodes well for the Catskills and Catskill Farms and give credence and added legitimacy to what I’ve been pretty sure of for awhile now, and that is the good times in the Catskills aren’t going away anytime soon, and things can trend back to ‘normal’ without denting the demand-supply imbalance that has defined the Catskills real estate market since April 2020.
I remember when the vaccine came out in November 2020, and I thought that could actually spell trouble for the upstate marketplace - but 2 things were true that kept mass vaccinations from eliminating the upstate demand. 1, the vaccines didn’t really work that well - at least not well enough to signal the end of the pandemic, and 2, hybrid work showed it could work.
Most of our clients are pretty well-established in their careers and are part of the decision-making around these workplace decisions and pivots, and if they were buying, and continuing to buy, that pretty said all there was to say. Hybrid work, especially around the NYC metro area, where people and families could better balance the hard life that is city life, the expensive life that is city life, - that almost everyone could split their time more evenly where before only the luckiest could count on a consistent Friday off, and a longer weekend.
It’s actually hard to overstate the disruption that Covid wrought - all sorts of things in the workplace that were hardly ever seen, that are now so commonplace as to be unremarked on.
Lawyers closing real estate transactions remotely. Digital signing of documents. Zooms instead of face to faces. Video calls in general. Online tutoring. The list is too long to even begin to list comprehensively - effective and efficient improvements to the workplace that never could have happened without some sort of disruption that outweigh all the interests that have to be shoved aside.
Some I just can’t buy into, however, such as camera video tours of homes to perspective buyers - any time someone would ask me to do that, I’d just say ‘no thanks’ - our stuff can’t be appreciated by video.
As had been true since the beginning of my upstate journey, the little niche I work in keeps defying national and regional trends. In 2008-2012, my NYC niche kept producing profits for us when the rest of the building industry was getting decimated - kept producing because NYC real estate held steady while the rest of the country dropped. Now, NYC was MOST impacted by the pandemic and the disruptions wrought by the pandemic, and that again benefited us.
12 days till we head to Africa.
Home we just sold in Saugerties, the 15th of the 16th that got started in April, 2020.
Ranch 54 - link and description.