Resales, and the French

It’s a rare Catskill Farms resale property that doesn’t sell quickly, and for full price.  The most recent example is a house we designed and built outside Narrowsburg NY overlooking the Delaware River.   This modern Ranch, one that I dreamed up to mirror the shape of the bend in the Delaware River it overlooks, is one of the most unique homes in SuCo, if not the Hudson Valley.  And priced at $1.5m, with a new studio/garage; a fairer price could not be had for this.  

The only reason it is selling for $1.5m instead of $2.9m is because of the affordability of our builds, the vertical integration of our efforts, the efficiency of our program.  I think they have less than a million invested in this property, which is just an absurdity on the face of it.

One reason we always live to fight another day is because we are always offering value, which we can do because I know my business and the markets about as well as someone can know these things, learned through lots of effort, lots of study, lots of curiosity and lots of sometimes costly experimentation.

Over and over and over for decades we have built homes, sold homes, had those homes resold, and repeated to the benefit of a wide range of Sullivan County businesses.  Needle-moving impacts.  Our aggregate macro and micro economic impacts are gigantic and game-changing, not just for the people who reside in the homes, but for the communities in which these homes exist.

I was thinking about the French, and our recent trip to the Alps, and I was remembering the 3 different run-ins I had with some French men - 1, in the cafeteria on top of one of the ski mountains where I was getting some cheese and bread and olives and waiting in line to pay, and someone’s shouting about something but because I don’t speak french I’m not paying much mind but then I realize it’s directed at me and it’s because my plate needs to be weighed to be priced right.  Now I was definitely in the inadvertent wrong - frankly never occurred to me - but the cost of a mozzarella stick I’m not sure rose to the level his voice inferred.

The 2nd was on the slopes, when a guy in front of me - and we weren’t going fast, sort of cut me off at low speeds - at the edge of a run, where I was out of horizontal space, and our skis tangle just minorly and I believe he might have quickly fallen and popped right back up, and come up fighting and yelling and pushed me to the ground.  I was in the Alps, and I was a bit shocked, so I didn’t have much of a reaction even to the push, but he certainly thought it was the end of the world.

And 3rd, at our ski slope condo, a large picture window had a crack in it, when we arrived, which you just assume everyone knows about, but I guess he didn’t and tried to blame us for it to the tune of nearly $2000.  One, it sucks to be blamed for something you didn’t do - it happens all the time in construction where someone you can’t identify did something, and you can either go around blaming everyone, or just eat the cost and preserve the team.  This was especially obnoxious because just by accident I snapped a time stamped photo at 5:34pm of the mountain views and that picture happened to capture the crack coincidentally.  We had only checked in at 5:15pm - so I get the guy can suspect us since he clearly missed the defect (or more likely, the cleaning company didn’t report it, or actually did it), but with that tight window - we arrive, literally immediately crack the window, and take a picture to prove it was already there - but with that tight window, any self-respecting host has to admit that’s a pretty tight timeline for us to be working under, like the unlikely 3 shots from Oswald’s rifle.  Anyway, AirBnb rejected his demand for money after an investigation.

United was responsible for a delayed bag, which forced my wingman Eli to buy head to toe ski gear on the slopes of a famous resort, which I can’t imagine there is a more expensive way to buy ski gear.  $1800 of ski jackets, pants, long john, etc…., which United reimbursed with a pretty straight-forward process.  I guess maybe first class passengers get better treatment, but even still it was amazingly efficient, communicative and in the end, took full responsibility.

So, I was facing literally $3500 of extra charges, but needled my way through them at no cost.

I’m sort of winning on all these types of fronts these days, with lots of bandwidth to evaluate problems, deploy actions or communications, and swagger towards successful resolution.  You can’t do that when you got too much on your plate and don’t have the mature support around you.  It’s frankly just too much to ask of even a veteran business-owner.  I think it’s a measure of the successful recalibration I’m seeking, that sweet spot of busy - enough to be profitable, not too much to be harried and chained to the stress.

Monday, the little Ranch sells, in Narrowsburg, and that finishes off a 3 house project on Wood Oak Drive. I bought those lots when they came on the market, and my only demand was that I get all 3, even if I have to pay a little more to make it happen, because few people care more about the impact on neighbors than I do, especially if they are my home, but generally also.  I've seen so many poorly planned homes that negatively impact, sometimes to a big degree, the peace and value of a neighboring property. Many times, just some consideration, knowledge and spending a little money would have prevented the whole drama.

PanAmerican road trip being planned.