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

Winter's been so long and spring's been so nasty that this 58 and sunny Saturday is being met with a lot of happy feelings and happy thoughts - so much that I'm just leaving the weather report up on the computer. This past week we had snow, frost, ice on the windshields and other generally depressing weather events. It's been real annoying and causing a lot of havoc with our blp (best laid plans). This summer, two more Catskill Farms homeowners are gettin' hitched, so that will make 3 weddings in the last 2 years. And if the laws were more liberal, I'm sure we'd have more weddings since we have sold a lot of homes to our gay clients over the years. Being at this for 8 yrs now, we've seen a lot of life events drive past our window. Holy smokerenos, March and April have been busy - I mean, if my marketing motivates 3 or 4 people a month to come up and visit us, that's always been a pretty good measure of success. Since early March, we have had literally 4-6 clients a weekend, more or less quadrupling our typical showing schedule. Like I said last year, I should get a little bus to tool around in and the homeowners who are so generous to allow us to view their homes (mostly all of them) should charge some admission fees and everyone would be doing just fine. Of all those visits, we've got 6 homes presently scheduled to start in the spring, and who knows what the month of April will bring. Today I got appointments at 10, 2:30, and 3:30 then have to be out of the house by 6 with my son Lucas since Lisa has a ladies only book club where not a lot of book discussion ever seems to occur. Tomorrow, got an 11:30 then a double team at 1pm. Another TV show called last week who thought we would make a great 'Flipping Out" of the east coast. He said all we needed was a gay guy in the office - he says the networks are always asking 'where the gay guy is.' I told him maybe we could turn the stereotype on it's head by doing a creative straight guy for once. Either way, there is no doubt that between our employees, our clients, our vendors, and subcontractors we have enough personality to fill an epic mini-series like the new Kennedy's drama. I told him it's doubtful we'd be interested, - we are busy and our first commitment of energy is always to our customers (I love LIOT on a Saturday morning)(laying it on thick).

You know, we have a lot of great customers from a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of different professions. We also see a lot of reasons and rationale for building and buying with us. It's personal, it's a big investment, it's a big lifestyle change, etc... And we take our part of the transaction very seriously. I mean, it's a delicate situation to be in - half the people I know up here I've done business with - not just small potatoes business, but like the largest transaction of their lives and that comes with some responsibility on our part to do our best. We've sold 80 +/- homes, we've renovated and restored another dozen - I can't go around the corner without running into someone who has exchanged 6 months of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars with me. And for the most part, we've successfully navigated the nuances of big business in a small town. Not entirely, but mostly. Chris came to us a year ago or more and liked our stuff and fell in love with Farm 12 and now here we are - it's no longer my baby, it's hers, and they closed on Friday of last week. Which was annoying. I think of my 5 closings this year so far, 4 of them we the days of big snowstorms, where you didn't really know how it was going to play out until the morning of. And considering it takes a lot of scheduling gymnastics to get the bank and the attorneys and the clients and the title people all to the table, it's all terribly stressful for everyone.

Farm 15 is cool. It sits on 7+ great acres, a few miles outside of Narrowsburg. The exterior will have black trim, and we are installing a big stone patio out the back. The exterior painting, final land grading, seeding and patio has to wait until Mid-May or so, so the ground dries out. The kitchen is getting rave reviews. Superb design and layout and a little experimental with the low slung cabinet depth/height refrigerator. Everyone I take through there is always looking for the fridge. But it's got all of our famous tricks - black rad, open shelves, nice range hood, island with cantilevered top, farm sink, lots of light, white washed wood plank ceilings, fan to keep things cool, polished stained wide plank floor.

and even our trademark barn door.

Any time I can create a little extra elbow room upstairs, I do it. Walking up the stairs to light and open-ness is a lot different than walking down an alley of doors.

Pretty classic -

Rads and a fireplace. and a good paint color.

Wood burning fireplace and salvaged barn beam mantel accent.

Catskill Farms has pretty much perfected the clean open simple floor plan look.

6 light 2 panel front door.

2 light, single panel, wood ceiling. This door is like 8' high.

One of the bedroom with lots of light and 5 panel interior doors.

Painted wainscoting, double sinks and mirror.

The guest bath with a nice gray.

BIG shower.

A neat small radiator, painted gloss black.

And a very unusual site at our homes - a garage!

So there you have it. Chris and her mom (who I enticed to the area by subtlety mentioning the Catholic church down the street) and her brother and the Catskill Farms team collaborated and made it happen. Another beauty, on time, on budget. Nice work team. Life goes on, and so does the work at Cottage 35, who had a really interested viewer over the weekend, so we will see how that pans out.

And little old shack, looking sharp. Still unspoken for.

And then a renovation we started at Yankee Lake. Taking her down the bones, adding a lot of windows and bring the whole house into a more modern sensibility.

Sooooo, Cottage 29 in contract, set to close next week. Farm 12 just closed. Cottage 34 closing very soon. Cottage 35 looking real good, although dateless at the moment. Shack 2 is awesome, also waiting to be asked to dance. Cottage 36 is in contract, and we are starting in a few weeks. Cottage 37 is moving towards contract. Farm 11 is moving towards contract. Micro-Cottage 4 is just starting, and is unspoken for. Ranch V is just commencing as well, and is unspoken for. and the Yankee Lake renovation is full steam ahead. Not a bad performance for the Great Recession.

Extra Extra, read all about it. $20m Pot Bust in Sullivan County At least it wasn't a meth lab. And then some great play on words - Neighbor is buzzing. High Drama. Neighborhood's gone to pot. Weed better clean up the neighborhood. Ending this post on a high note.

Never before have these names been pasted together in a headline I'm sure. The Strokes are everywhere these days, on TV, on Radio, on Tour, in Print - with a new album and cool SPIN mag article after a few years of silence. Thing is, their guitarist, Albert, is one of our favorite Catskill Farms' homeowners with a sweet farmhouse and barn on 10 acres actually just across the street from my house. Oh the stories I could tell.... Like the 48 hours straight inebriated fireworks show with commercial grade fireworks that ended with Lisa and I both embarrassing ourselves by acting like old farts and telling them to cool it. Albert gave me these as consolation I suppose.

Just kidding, anyway we built a 'barn' for him - a fully outfitted, commercial grade sound studio wrapped up in a barn exterior - very cool, for sure, and the Strokes did some mixing and music-making up there for the new album. And David - I mean, since David bought a Cottage from us a few years back when we were just getting our groove on, his career since (and his mate's Amber's) has totally been busy, with movies, his own written/directed/produced TV show that was just picked up for season 2. I'm not saying our homes inspire creativity, greatness, popularity and top-of-the-charts positioning - well, actually, maybe I am. David turned Albert onto us, and Gavin from Vice fame and more as well. In the past 5 yrs, we've seen our homeowners get married, get promoted, get rich, get popular, get settled in, write a book, create some music, make an album, plant a garden, build a birdhouse and much more. it's cool, for sure. And the big common thread is that these folks don't have to worry about what will next go wrong with their house like people buying older homes. they got a house that works, which is a great start to enjoying this big life decision of country respite. And Norm Brodsky, well, he is the in-house 'entrepreneur columnist' for Inc. magazine since the mid-90's. I discovered him while perusing the Small Business blogs of the New York Times. Very fresh insights and guidance from a veteran business owner, who kept me coming back to his columns with revelations on methods of decision-making, seeing through the fog of business, and straight-forward advice. Like most good writing, he points out the obvious yet elusive point, what's always been there - it just has gone un-summarized, un-capsulated. So, literally, Janice my assistant and all-around office warrior printed out every article he ever wrote since 1995 and I read them over the past 3 months. The binder was like 7" thick. It was like 'Continuing Education', since his insights into gross margins, misspent marketing $$, and how competition is good for small business were great lessons that I already knew but didn't. The tidbit I like the best is the story he tells about how he is an angel investor in certain businesses and he will almost never invest in new businesses with fancy newly furnished offices and equipment because he knows - from his experience - that that startup capital will be needed for something else before too long, and it will be gone. It took us 7 years before we had an office to be proud of. We always had a neat business and the lack of spiffy offices never seemed to scare people away, but boy did I need every single penny to keep it going at times, and thank the lord I didn't spend it on Aeron and Eames chairs, networked computers, efficient phone systems and new trucks like I do now. Our reception -

more of our reception...

My friend Zach's Harley - I've been tempted on many occasions to claim ownership, but I figure I'm cool enough already.

And our bathroom made up of leftover tiles from 7 years of building cool houses. A little psychedelic, but hey, it's better than being bland.

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