Site visit and home re-sales
I did something today I haven't done in years - I attended the end of job final walk-thru with the Amanda, my main designer and project manager who has been with me for quite awhile now, and the clients who are buying the home. I had/have no objection to attending, and there have literally been hundreds of opportunities (aka closings) over the last 7 years, but it's really Amanda's lane and who am I to butt in on her turf. Plus, I'm not in need of any more work, especially the hard work of the last walk-thru, where stress and managing expectations is common and necessary. I haven't physically attended a sales closing either in quite some time, long before the pandemic made that standard practice. It's all about time management and those two events in the process 1, take up a lot of time, and 2, aren't my strong suit.
It's hard to describe the hard work I do everyday to make the client experience as painfree as it is. And I know how painfree it is, because I talk to other people and their processes are far different than what we offer, where homeowners and build clients are subject and exposed to the full spectrum of trials and tribulations of building a home, be it permitting, lending, board of healths, utilities, and the hundred other tasks that take real skill and aren't that fun. I think the one flaw in our building process is we make it too easy - many people who build homes are just so darn thankful to be reaching something that could be considered a finish line that the idea of opening a can of worms about this issue or that issue that may prevent move in is just really off the table. Us, with only 2 or 3 site meetings and an effort that seems sometimes like we wave a magic wand and things happen, there is still plenty of energy left to get lost in the details and lose the big or even small picture.
Not sure If I'm making sense, but what has always been missing from our process is me - the owner, the guy who most every time has made the original sale through skillful process education and finding the thing that works for that client - that me, the guy who drops off the screen early on in the process as I hand the baton to Amanda and I work behind the scenes on the mechanical heavy lifts - that it's been clear to me for years that I should be at these end of process meet and greets, maybe not to spend the whole time there for the walk-thru, but for a thank you and a handshake. But even that is not easy - we are busy, and I'm pulled in lots of directions.
But, back to what I was saying, it's clear to me it's important to the brand and the business and the client frame of mind that I do so, so the idea that after 20 years (7 delegating this end of job thang) I was able to pop in and spend a few hours with the clients who trust us (me) to pull this off, that's important. It also feels good to me, since just dealing with the bullshit all the time, and not getting the chance to interact with people who are top of game, and very interesting, diverse, etc.. - that to me was always something I knew I shouldn't be skipping in terms of getting real gratification from what I do for a living.
And it's funny - not quite the right word- that I'm aware of this, have been aware of this, and now finally, in 2022, can and am making the effort to deepen these relationships with people and families who have chosen us, trusted us, to help them with this upstate aspiration. It's always been a critical detail, one I just couldn't get done. I'm having dinner with them, throwing small parties, reaching out.
That happens a lot in business - you know something needs be done, but there is just no way you can do it. Lack of money, lack of bandwidth, lack of labor and skilled resources. So it sits there, undone. No business doesn't have their list of things that just haven't been gotten to but everyone knows it should be gotten to. A website update, etc...
Our resales - what I used to consider real evidence of the quality of our homes, and the demand for them - are off the charts. The prices people are getting for our homes is insane. That's hyperbole since I think people who buy our homes are smart (and lucky) and 'insane' makes them sound ungrounded in data, and that is not the case - however, the prices are high, and the return on the investment for a lot of these people is pretty insane.
Here's one we finished in 2018 - on the market for a couple of days - MAYBE they paid $600k for it. Selling in the high $900's. In 2.5 years. Even for affluent people, this is a big cha ching, ROI. We've seen it dozens of times. Sort of makes me nervous I've left too much money on the table for some of my deals, but when I look at my profits and margins, I think I'm doing the right thing, watching the market, staying under it. I mean, we have nothing to sell, and go out of our way to make it hard to get in, contact with us. When I see people, investors, etc... calmly pricing new homes - or creating business plans around sales in the $1m-$1.5 mark, eh, to me, that's just a big risk, and if the market would turn, it wouldn't be pretty. But, you know, the Catskills could really be onto something this time. The hybrid work thing has fundamentally changed the Catskills, a very attractive place to live. People are clamoring for our homes, for sure.
Back on the Road
With the denouement of the pandemic, I'm back on the road, dragging my son along, and a colleague or two. Amazing it's been 18 months more or less of light or no travel.
NYC, Great Barrington, Killington, and Big Sky Montana. And a big trip planned for end of June, early July.
They say the journey not the destination is the secret, and I couldn't agree more, and that's why we are always in the front of the plane and on the top floors of hotels, courtesy many times of the gigantic amount of miles and rewards I earn by running our large company expenses through credit cards. I'm often amazed that these awards aren't taxed in some way (thank you credit card lobbyists!), even when they are giving you direct cash back, but I'm thankful. I earn enough awards that I feel I have to include them in my estate plans, since the material benefit is real.
I use an assortment of airline cards (delta, united, american), hotel cards (mostly Marriott for the W hotels), reward cards that you can use flexibly (Chase Ink), and even cards like Capitol One, where post-travel you can select to use rewards which I thought was really genius. The hotel and airline cards, especially for higher end travel, has gotten a little sketch in terms of points needed to earn free travel, requiring 2 or 3x what they used to - or as some old timer says somewhere, a million points isn't what it used to be.
The ski trips have been fun - one on the east and one on the west. Really the only thing they shared other than great getaways and time well spent with family was one day was stormy and poor visibility (wintry) and the other day glorious cold blue skys. Both have their attributes. In Big Sky, we got dumped on with 10" of fresh powder between Saturday night and Sunday, which provided a fresh powder experience none of my group had every experienced before and took a little getting used to.
On the business front, we have 4 closings coming up in the next 45 days, and that provides a lot of logistical work for us all. With the end of winter, that creates a lot of phone calls that start with 'hey i hear it's going to be nice out, can we do this or that?"
My job is getting easier
Post covid seems to be here. Even in Vermont, bastion of strict covid rules and masking, is finished with social distancing and masking, with packed ski lodges and slopes mask and safety protocol free. That was eye-opening. My son is even mask free in school, 24 months after masking up. It's hard to remember that only 5 weeks ago, we were running scared because of omicron.
On a business front, i haven't taken a sales call (except for those lucky few who have somehow managed to thread the needle and get me on the phone, or get a return email). I'm burnt out, my team needs a break, and the constant searching for a way to do more gets old. Our team, like many teams, was good before covid and is even better now, and now I'm focused on calibrating just the right amount of work that keeps the pockets flush, the bonuses and profit shares flowing, all 6 cylinders pumps but no danger of overheating.
It's a strange feeling after 24 months of pinned red zone RPM's, to be idling in the 6000/7000 range, able to let off the gas and gun it as needed, knowing what you got under the hood.
At this point, Catskill Farms has become very selective about who and why we work for. It's almost a reserve brand, fully priced, hard to get into.
As part of our employee retainage efforts, I started a 401k employer match safe harbor program 6 years ago. This year I paid out over $100k in matches, bonuses, and profit shares to my 10 person team. I also donated about $15k to local non-profits.
With a clean bill of personal health, post-pandemic business and personal plans ongoing, and a team to be reckoned with, 2022 should resemble 2021 in terms of success, but without all the uncertainty, stress, and fog of war.
That's something to write home about.
OH, Right, this is a blog about homes we build and sell. We sold 2 last week - one in Narrowsburg, Sullivan County and one in Saugerties, Ulster County.
NYC is Back
The last time I was in NYC was just before Christmas when the Omicron was emerging and there were ( mostly exaggerated) reports of a city freaking out. While I may have disagreed with the extent of the emergency being reported, there was no doubt the city was once again on an uncertain footing, unsure of what business and personal disruptive wave was coming next.
I'm here now for a full day preventative health exam offer by Princeton Longevity Center where they scan, poke, insert, flush, inflate and test really every part of your body from brain to heart to colon to bone mass to whatever else that makes our body ticks. It's a bit of a higher end concierge approach to medicine, which I'm all for. On the 71st floor of One World Trade, the views weren't bad either.
It was a beautiful warm day, and masking mandates were being eliminated and it just really felt that at least for yesterday, the pandemic was coming to an end in terms of day to day disruption. And you could feel the pulse quickening the city. And the thing about an event of this magnitude is that the impact and effect/affect on people's psyche is so repressed and buried because they had to continue on with life, raise kids, go to work, keep their marriage strong, and do a million life things with this incredible life danger stress underlying everything, repressed, stiff upper lip. So the idea we may be emerging, not a false emergence like when we got our vaccines, or wore our masks, but a real finality, that type of deep exhale, teary response could be felt.
I think its hard to overstate the stress that has been threaded through each and every person, young and old, for nearly 2 years. Cancelled plans, missed graduations, families separated - it doesn't matter how much money you made or didn't, if you got sick or you did not - the daunting nature of the challenge was real.
So, with jackets off, restaurants full, a less aggressive masking policy, and a bounce in the step, this big city felt good and alive.
I've probably mentioned this before - I think one of the reasons for the robust economy, the inflation and the low joblessness, is because we all got better at what we do, are more efficient, have less rules that don't make sense - Covid disrupted the status quo like few things ever had, and for people in my professional peer group, the challenges we faced and overcame the last two years have made us better at what we do. Sort of like why athletes train with weights around their ankles - makes the ordinary harder, and when you take the weights off, you are faster than you were before with the same effort. That increased productivity is now baked into the economy, in millions of professionals, and each of their more efficient micro decisions and actions have a little more juice to them, resulting in a macro impact on the economy as a whole.
Bake in the time saved with Zoom, remote/hybrid work and a thousand other workplace changes, and we have just lived through a revolution not unlike the industrial, where there was a true leap forward from the status quo.
