Catskills - Sullivan County - Ulster County Real Estate -- Catskill Farms Journal

Old School Real estate blog in the Catskills. Journeys, trial, tribulations, observations and projects of Catskill Farms Founder Chuck Petersheim. Since 2002, Catskill Farms has designed, built, and sold over 250 homes in the Hills, investing over $100m and introducing thousands to the areas we serve. Farms, Barns, Moderns, Cottages and Minis - a design portfolio which has something for everyone.

Friday, May 24, 2024

Memorial Day thoughts and reflections

4 days until my 27 yr old nephew and I head out to the South of France. With a basecamp in Nice, we explore north and south from there - though I guess it’s mostly north.  I think I’m going to get a shave each day at a different barber, whittle away the days with strolls and hikes and naps, and do my best to put down my damn phone.  Besides our business class seats and our what looks to be a pretty fabulous Airbnb, we have zero, nunka, plans laid out ahead of time.

It’s Friday morning, and I don’t leave until Monday, mid-day, so that leaves time to throw a party on Sunday by the pool.  That should be fun and the weather should be great - which is a miracle.

Some warm water!

Our local bike shop in Milford where I live runs a few weekly ‘no-drop’ bike rides - Monday night 10+ miles of mountain biking and Thursdays 24 miles of road biking.  No drop means you wait at intervals for the slowest, which can be a bit of a pain, but turns out not too bad.  Even for aging gent like myself, get out on that bike enough and stamina and strength improvements are sure to follow.

I’m thinking about selling my baby, my 1972 Chevy Malibu.  Why?  I’m not sure.  More on that a little later.  But I’m giving it real consideration.  I guess it’s a little bit of spitefulness because the weather sucks so much anymore, and a little bit of consolidation of assets and expenses.  When you are moving from playing with $1.3m a month of cash flow, to some sort of much more fixed income existence, you start looking at every expense.  With Catskill Farms, the last 4 years have been so go-go, that we piled on expenses without a lot of micro-controls.  Don’t me wrong, I’m always careful with my money, but when you are doing as much business as we are/were, it’s impossible not to put on a little expense fat. We have trucks we don’t use, phones we don’t use, computers we don’t use, key man life insurance policies far in excess of the amount I borrow anymore (the bank likes me to have life insurance equal to their lines of credit limits they give me), etc…  So we are looking at every expense.

But the cherry red Malibu with the white interiors I picked up 4 or 5 years ago is such a nice car - and when I say nice I don’t mean ‘nice’ like you are afraid to drive it.  I mean ‘nice’ as in you can’t love driving it around.  Those seats are comfy like a couch.  I’ve done a few big road trips of 3000 miles plus in it, once with the dog, and once with my nephew and son.  It’s not a big expense - insurance is cheap and don’t owe anything on it.  But it’s a lightly used asset, and those are on the chopping block.

While you are in it, it’s hard to remember what it used to be like. Since March of 2020, me and my staff have lived a life of ‘hold on for your dear life’ of business expansion, taking a company that likes to build 6-8 homes a year and tripling that, overnight, across a two hour travel distance, within dozens of small municipalities each with their own rules.  It’s only now that we are down to 9, and soon down to 7, that I begin to remember that life was not always the way it was for the last 4 years, when I used to take mental health Mondays and long weekend Fridays, in the same week, consistently.

We did that volume of business in the toughest business climate one could imagine, the Covid climate where all rules were off the table, where the rules changed on a daily basis, where people’s lives were actually dependent on our efforts, where supply and labor chains were completely disrupted.  We expanded - doubled or more- right into the face of those challenges.  And put 50 families into homes.  And made a lot of money.  And worked everyday, all day. We took our job seriously, unlike most other builders out there.

So it’s only now that we are down to 7 or 8 homes, which is still double what most building companies can handle, that the toll of those years becomes clear, as the new reduced workday reveals itself.  Where every little detail doesn’t threaten the big picture.

The problem I was beginning to have - and when I say beginning - I mean for the last year or two, is I had so many problems to solve it became impossible to really understand which problems were big and which were not, which needed one type of reaction, and which needed a different type.  It was just all one big tangled mess of problem-solving, employee and sub management, a hamster wheel of booking business and building homes.  I carried the load for dozens of families and hundreds of vendors, subtractors and employees, let alone my family and even my dog.  All needed me.

It’s nice to be needed.  But it’s going to be nice not to be needed so much.  To hang up the hero’s cap/cape, and just be an ordinary joe.  That’s what I’m starting to see now that we are returning to our origins of 6 homes a year. Where I can just shrug my shoulders and let it be, not having to rush in to fix it.

Got my garden in, only by the skin of my teeth and the help of a good friend. If I would have left from France without getting it straighten up, it probably wouldn't have happened this year.

Baseball season is in full swing from my 45+ men's league.

And the two books Im taking on the trip. I'm a Fitzgerald fan, so I've read all of his stuff several times. Tender is the Night is set in the Riviera, in the 20's, at the height of his fame. And Death in the Riviera is hopefully tolerable as a low-effort read.

As they say in France, Au revoir. See you in a few weeks.

Sunday, May 19, 2024

Friday afternoon in Olivebridge

Heavy lift after heavy lift. Problem solving after problem solving. Then two final walk-thrus on nearly completed homes.

This is Primo, who reinvented his grandfather's gas/tire/convenience store into a vital go-to general market in the Olivebridge area.

You have to zoom in to see the baby smiling to get the real impact of the joy at this meeting. These folks were the first to sign up for a home in the project.

And the young family below checking out their Ranch on 10+ acres.

Below, the Team. James, in the back, is getting ready to do a 28 mile rim to rim, one day, Grand Canyon hike over Memorial Day.

I love this style Barn house with the first floor primary suite, lots of volume of space and big back porch. This one will be for sale, but no one knows about it yet. It'll be the last one sold in Ashokan. I'm thinking I will build the whole thing and sell it, maybe with a pool and a garage. It's a beautiful piece of land.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Real estate market update

Surprise - it's raining.

It appears the big 2024 push is over.  Sure, we are busier than ever, and have closings queued up monthly for the rest of the year, but the heavy heavy lift of getting stuff out of the ground is mostly behind us for now.  And with land being so damn hard to find, I’m not sure when if ever we will be pounding out the work like we did over the last 15 months, or really the last 4 years since the commencement of the pandemic and the bum-rush from NYC to the Catskills.

Quintessential American Four Square

With 2 more Ashokan Acres homes set to close in the 3 weeks, that takes that total number to 5, out of 9 total.  4 in Narrowsburg well on their way as well.  The next decision will be where to go from here.  Chasing the never-ending hamster wheel of squeezing margins out of immense cash flow, or something more exciting - by more exciting, I actually mean less exciting, since the act of developing/designing/building/selling can begin to seem a bit repetitive when the only goal and result is to wake up and do it again.  For 24 years.

Well drilling.

At Ashokan Acres, even the homes that aren’t complete are well along, with the least along being insulated this week.  We struggled with the wells up there in terms of finding water affordably, but even that heavy lift is now complete.  That project has been difficult - lots of poor weather, and lots of hard rock.  We’ve hit a lot of rock when we endeavored to build a home across the Catskills, but this rock is of a different nature - it’s seriously hard.  So anything from well lines, to electric lines, to septic tanks take on a different nature when you are fighting the rock of this type.   The heavy lift of this development project - with the day in day out challenges - makes it unlikely I attempt to do it again soon, even if there were lots of viable plots available, which there aren’t.  Land is in very short supply.

Been building these studios.

Land is in very short supply especially when you contrast it with a softening real estate market - day by day, the market is getting softer, which for us doesn’t necessarily mean less homes or lower prices, it just means the discipline to buy land priced right is even more important.  Luckily, I stayed disciplined, and didn’t pay more for good land - at least not top prices.  I’m definitely paying more, but still staying the course.  But overall, the market is definitely adjusting to a post-pandemic return to earth status quo - I just saw the other day a good real estate company advertising ‘12 Open Houses This Weekend’ - mostly Sullivan County stuff.  That’s a lot, and that should begin to bring prices down for the market in general.  For us, it reminds me that staying the course and making small and gradual price adjustments to our product, instead of doubling like everyone else, keeps us perfectly able to continue to produce homes regardless of this upcoming Catskills correction. Moving fluidly, like water, with the market, as we always have.

Even with the correction, however, it doesn’t mean that there will be an abundance of land available, especially in Ulster County where it actually is near zero.  Quite a few people in my business - not as long lived, hence more susceptible to exuberance - bought land and small developments where the land was going for $200k plus.  Meaning a $1.5m house.  To me, that was never the sweet spot, and I walked away disappointed from quite a few projects that I actually really wanted, but in the end, that pricing discipline was important, and I’d be kicking myself now if I was carrying that type of land at those prices. I think our current prices, adjusted by county, are very sustainable, and inexplicably for a market leader, below the top prices we could get.

NYC Japanese Cultural parade across from the Dakota.

That said, the Catskill Farms’ homes are in high demand.  As always.  It’s a good product, and we do a good job.  And as we ‘slow down’ (defined as twice as busy and fast as anyone else) for the first time in 4 years, it’s apparent at how good we really are, and how committed our team really is, and that people who build with us really are fortunate, because the stories that paint a more arduous building journey are more often told then our repeated streamlined success stories.

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Ranch 67, Another One Sold

The 3rd house at our Ashokan Acres project sold on Friday.  A Ranch, on 9 acres.  Pretty nice set up.  One thing we learned along the way on this one is don’t order from West Elm - jeez, between interminable delivery times, product delivered that doesn’t match the website, and poor customer service, it’s just a vendor who is missing on too many fronts to be trusted with our speedy home delivery process.  

We are well over the 50% completion up there, so it becomes about ‘what’s next’?  I don’t really know.  Land opportunities don’t abound.  Starting a modular container ship pool company that should simplify the pool acquisition dreams of lots of families, and that might get interesting, even among our existing clients of which number over 300. Working on the branding.

Without thinking too hard - it is early Sunday morning - of the 300 homes we sold, I think probably more than 200 original families still live in them.

It’s fascinating how many different ways we are monetizing our efforts these days - single family home rentals, single family home sales, spec homes, custom homes, Airbnb, holding mortgage notes.

The rotator cuff surgery recovery is being tested now that baseball season is in full swing.  The overall healing seems to be holding, but the tightness is proving a handicap on the accuracy of the throws, and the strength isn’t really there yet.  Throwing a ball- especially the motion of throwing a baseball - is a very complex motion/movement, un-natural in many ways, with stresses on a bunch of small muscles weaved in and out of bone.  While rotator cuff issues aren’t uncommon, from what I learned during this process about the muscular and bone makeup of this region I’m surprised they aren’t even more common, especially for us who have literally thrown a ball tens of thousands of times.

God, when I think back on that recovery, it seems otherworldly in its plodding process through pain and range of motion restrictions.  Day after day, month after month, where 9 months later it still is recovering.  Then you go back and read all the things your surgeon or primary doctor didn’t tell you, and you see that the process is pretty predictable.  It was never going to be a 2-4 month recovery.  PT was never going to be those tedious motion movements you see most often at a PT venue but instead soul-destroying range of motion movements earning ¼” of movement after ¼” of movement, all through eye-popping pain.

I can see how people never make it out of the recovery period -it just gets old, tedious, painful and the sacrifice of some permanent range of motion becomes less important than moving past the daily routine of attempting to regain the motion.  If you look at the tiny muscles they repair, it’s hard to believe that repair sends shocks waves up and down the entire upper body as it first ‘protects’ the injury by overcompensating other muscle groups, and then as you work to regain motion, it yanks the rest of the torso out of equilibrium as the extreme tightness in the shoulder puts pressure elsewhere. If I never hear the word 'Supraspinatus' again I'll live happily.

Rotator Cuff Disorders: The Facts - OrthoBethesda

The question I get asked, and that I ask myself is would I do it again knowing what I do now about the recovery.  That is a moving target question, with my answer changing as the process winds down.  At first, you spend 4 months in intensive rehab without full confidence that all the work will result in actually a better shoulder - it just seems so unlikely based on its initial baseline of non-functionality.  Like all memories, as progress was made, the memory of the hardship fades, and if in a year I’m throwing a ball like I did 10 years ago, well, then it will be hard to argue it wasn’t worth it - but let’s qualify it this way - if my left shoulder goes for whatever reason - my non-primary arm - it’s highly unlikely a surgical repair would be top of my list.

I have a passion for personal finance literacy, consume tons of podcasts and books on the topic, and have my long journey from money-less to monied to pull from for lessons.  So, I’m leading a class at the local high school on Tuesday, a 90 minute class, that I hope to flip into a club or ongoing education.  With every current of American life encouraging debt and buying what you can’t afford, and little counter-education available, keeping kids out of early debt, and raising their awareness of the debilitating consequences of debt on their future wealth-building tools is something that seems valuable indeed.  I'm paying the incentives to attend through a donor-advised non-profit fund I set up in 2021 and now has a balance exceeding 6 figures. This one could get pricey if we get good attendance, at $100 a pop.

For me, and my journey, I used debt like the devil.  My first house I bought with one of those credit card bank checks that come in the mail. 

400 sq ft of glory.
Same house as above. The Rock House, in Cochecton NY.

I was so far into debt for so long with little in the way of income that the idea I came out the other side is a testament to sticking with an idea, working non-stop for decades, and having a really good idea that I kept improving.  I wouldn’t recommend it, because for one, few products are like houses where the payoff and cash flow is so sizable.   Now I’m debt averse, do most everything with cold hard cash, and cringe every time I need to borrow operating capital to finish a home.   But it wasn’t always that way - Just ask my neighborhood bank Jeff Bank - who funded this endeavor with bold strokes of trust that somehow, someway, I’d figure it out.  Of the many rewards of the this journey, having the local bank board made up of a cumulative centuries of local experience take a winger on me has always been a fascinating part of the story - just like I often say I know my clients and their respective aspirations better than they do in many situations, this bank probably knew or saw or had an inclination into my chances - having seen so many people - as well or better than I did.

And that intuition of this bank has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of local economic stimulus derived from my efforts.  It’s a cool story.

The below is the house in Fremont Ny that I passed one day and I labeled it 'the perfect house' in terms of roof lines and the essence it captured.

We recaptured its glory in this Farmhouse, which we've built 4-6 times in the ensuing 20 years.

As someone with a long history of in-depth reading of all things journalism, across a wide range of publications, you get a feel for how things get reported.  I'm just wondering when that photo from Gaza will emerge that forever defines this whole disaster. Or maybe it never will - the self-censorship of all media is extraordinary although I'm sure all the dead journalists and other aid workers has been a deterrent for an intrepid photographer. Who knew Fox and the NY Times shared such common values?

Phan Thi Kim Phuc - Wikipedia
CIVIL RIGHTS William Hudson photographer Iconic photogra
Hindenburg disaster - Wikipedia

How an iconic AP photo showed toll of Vietnam War to America | The  Associated Press

Charles Petersheim, Catskill Farms (Catskill Home Builder)
At Farmhouse 35
A Tour of 28 Dawson Lane
Location
Rock & Roll
The Transaction
The Process
Under the Hood
Big Barn
Columbia County Home
Catskill Farms History
New Homes in the Olivebridge Area
Mid Century Ranch Series
Chuck waxes poetic...
Catskill Farms Barn Series
Catskill Farms Cottage Series
Catskill Farms Farmhouse Series
Interviews at the Farm ft. Gary
Interviews at the Farm ft. Amanda
Biceps & Building
Catskill Farms Greatest Hits
Construction Photos
Planned It
Black 'n White
Home Accents at Catskill Farms, Part 2
Home Accents at Catskill Farms, Part 1