Olivebridge NY - New Home for Sale Information
Interestingly, for all the things this blog is and has been, it's never really been used as a looking-forward tool for what we are building, where we are building, and when it will be available.
But with inquiries coming in fast and furious and everyone wanting to talk on the phone for some reason, I'm trying to figure out how to best inform this hungry buyer segment with what we have in the works.
THIS IS A SIMILAR HOME PREVIOUSLY BUILT.
WHAT - 1550 SQ FT 3 BEDROOM, 1.5 BATH ON 4 ACRES. 600 sq ft of decks and covered porches.
WHERE - OLIVEBRIDGE, NY ON THE CORNER OF RT 3 AND HANNA LANE
WHEN - FOUNDATION IS IN. FRAME ROOF AND WINDOWS IN BY END OF JUNE. OCTOBER FINISH.
HOW IT WORKS - SIGN UP NOW, AND WORK WITH US ON THE INTERIOR SELECTIONS SUCH AS PAINT, FLOOR STAINS, KITCHEN, COUNTERTOPS, TILE LIGHTING, PLUMBING AND A HOST OF OTHER FUN SELECTIONS TO PERSONALIZE THE HOME.
FLOORPLAN
PRICE - $495K.
DESCRIPTION -
Excellent spot in Olivebridge, in the shadow of Ashokan High Point, just 5 miles from the Ashokan Reservior and the endless hiking, biking of the Catskills. This floor plan allows for 3 bedrooms and a lot of living space on the first floor. Full walk-out basement could add another 600 sq ft in the future. A covered front porch and a screened back porch expands the house. Land is private and gently sloping.
This back profile will not be exactly the same but you get the idea.
The interior is 1500 sq ft +, has 1.5 baths, a wood burning fireplace and open floor plan with a separate but equal glass encased dining room. Light enters easily to every nook of the home, on the first floor and second. Wide plank floors, fun hand rail systems, classic tile, functional kitchens all combine to illustrate why Catskill Farms has been the go-to design build for the last 2 decades.
It's a good looking home for sure, but it also is highly functioning - with whole house airconditioning, spray foam insulation that allows you to heat your home with a candle and cool it with an ice cube, on demand hot water heaters which produce hot water only when you ask for it and a whole house bumper to bumper warranty.
Appraises without an issue, and fully financeable.
Great Resource for the Hudson Valley
Since 1995+/-, these guys have been putting out an essential magazine for the Hudson Valley. and it's even more essential now, not because I say it or they say it, but because they are working hard to make it so, as they have done for decades.
https://www.chronogram.com/
https://therivernewsroom.com/
Bird Feeder Update, and Hot Real Estate market
Like a good Agatha Christie mystery (anyone ever see 1944 academy award nominee Gaslight, Angela Landsbury's first role at 19?) or a Sherlock Holmes yarn, the bird feeder drama took a turn towards clarification. It was a bear. How do I know? First, I was confused at how the bird feeder didn't shatter as it hit the concrete porch - by the laws of physics, and it's construction makeup, it certainly should have. 2nd, there wasn't a seed from the spill anywhere to be found on the ground, and while certainly I could imagine Mr Squirrel and his friends and assorted birds making quick work of the spill, not quicker than I would have noticed the increase in activity since all I really do these days is sit in my man chair reading and watching the bird feeders.
So, 3 evening past, I was sitting here in my well-worn chair, reading, when from the corner of my eye some new shape enters peripherally. It's funny how the brain works - it works backwards from what is most probable, most familiar, rules them out by process of elimination and continues paging through other scenarios. So, in this millisecond, I went from bird, child, gardener, neighbor to looking over, 7' away through glass, to see a momma bear with one little cub the size of a soccer ball. Literally the cub most have been on his first life excursion. Momma is reared up, paws to the bird feeder. Fumbling for my phone, yelling for lucas, the bear senses danger and meanders off.
So, I owe the Amish bird feeder maker an apology. It wasn't his craftsmanship. The bear literally reached up, delicately put two paws on the bird feeder, gave a quick tug, broke the rope, put it on the ground and ate away.
So there's that.
Funny how putting a kid in a classic car with an American flag makes us seem like anti-mask wearing, social distancing denying, open now nincompoops, but we aren't. We just love our country and the freedoms, be is speech, opportunity, religion, etc... that is part of This American Life.
I remember after the white supremacists invaded Charlottesville VA a few years back and my friend Bryan commented that it was embarrassing to buy tiki torches for his yard at Home Depot since the racists down there were using them in their marches - really sad the flag has the same ability to divide now.
There's also a pandemic explosion of urban flight looking for upstate properties. I'm not usually as wrong as I was on this one, but any theory I had about depressed demand because of deep cuts this virus is making into the heart of NYC will need to wait, since for now, demand is off the charts.
News article we were quoted in -
http://www.westmilfordmessenger.com/news/local-news/pandemic-driven-house-frenzy-hits-local-towns-AL1159772
I'm still not all that certain for what the future holds, since it seems like a lot of the pain is being artificially delayed with Fed action, with mortgage forbearance action (as opposed to default), with federal stimulus, rent holidays and increased unemployment compensation levels. But for now, you have a level of activity in an already busy marketplace I've never seen before. And there is not a whole to sell, so if you are a seller, or thinking about selling, now is definitely the time.
This resale of Farm 33 in Rhinebeck is going into contract for nearly $1m, the largest increase over sales price ever recorded for a Catskill Farms home.
Barn 7 in Barryville went into contract in one week with multiple backup offers.
And Farm 19 in Narrowsburg survived on the market for 5 days before 2 full price offers came through.
The new Catskill Farms Ranch 37 home in Kerhonkson just went into contract.
And Catskill Farms put 3 homes into contract that aren't built yet. I fended off another dozen clients with badly executed karate moves.
As someone who values competence, when I read things like the following it makes me sad and mad, not sure which emotion is more pronounced, since I confuse the two half the time, like any red-blooded emotionally challenged American male should -
"In the first six months of 1942, the [U.S.] government gave out more than $100 billion in military contracts, more than the entire gross national product of 1940. In the war years, American industry turned out 6,500 naval vessels; 296,400 airplanes; 86,330 tanks; 64,546 landing craft; 3.5 million jeeps, trucks, and personnel carriers; 53 million deadweight tons of cargo vessels; 12 million rifles, carbines, and machine guns; and 47 million tons of artillery shells, together with millions of tons of uniforms, boots, medical supplies, tents, and a thousand other items needed to fight a modern war.
"The Ford Motor Company alone produced more war matériel than the entire Italian economy. By 1944 its Willow Run plant was turning out B-24 bombers at the rate of one every sixty-three minutes. Henry J. Kaiser, who at first knew so little about ships that he referred to the front and the back instead of the bow and stern, brought the techniques of automobile mass production to shipbuilding. He reduced the time needed to build a liberty ship -- the standardized freighter of seventy-two hundred tons and thirty thousand parts -- from 244 days to 42. A total of 2,710 were produced during the war, each, in Roosevelt's words, 'a blow for the liberty of the free peoples of the world.'
And we can't even ramp up to produce virus tests in this day and age.
Incident at the Bird feeder, and other Hudson Valley Happenings
There was an incident at the bird feeder. The feeder, which fed an increasing array of birds of red, yellow, tufted and other, was found on the ground, seed spread wildly. Was it a manufacturers defect - some Lancaster County Amish bird feeder maker who had a weak staple - or was it the squirrel, who day after day eyed it from an arts and crafts column edge, contemplating the length of the jump to the bird feeder? did he finally make the leap, and was left hanging for his life by his claws on the feeder platform, little squirrel heart racing, his grip tiring, and falling, falling, falling - 5' down, a fall I'm sure he's done a hundred times. If it was the squirrel, this successful brush with fate will certainly only embolden him, if he is anything like me.
The wreakage was breathtaking in its severity. On closer examination, I was able to pop the sides back into position, reposition the hanging cord, and put it back into place. I now watch warily for what may transpire.
I had a dilemma the other day, when toilet paper was still in short supply at the stores. I had two rolls. One a very nice triple ply, and another a coarse single ply of whose thin quality I hadn't encountered in a long while and really have no idea how it got into my home. Anyways, it's allergy season and I go through a lot of tissue paper with nose blowing, so I had to choose which for the butt, and which for the nose. I don't regret my choice - and it was similar to that of Sophie's - but after a few days of that cheap paper on my ass, I must have stopped by every grocery store, dollar general and grocery score before I found a new supply of the tri-ply. The question that was logically posed to myself - late at night, when all is asleep and quiet and natural self-reflection creeps in- have I gotten that soft, or is that a fair thing to call a necessity? When I evaluated my initial decision, i think it came down to which call of nature was going to be most frequent, thus most often quelled and assisted by paper tissue and by far that is the nose during allergy season.
It's busy in the Catskills. It's funny how time is accelerated. A week is an hour, a month is a day, in terms of new ways to live and rules around them. The full brunt of the pandemic reaction is literally less than 7 weeks old and it's hard to imagine life prior. That said, my initial relunctance to join the bandwagon of 'how robust the real estate market is going to be' has been wholly repudiated. It's busy out there and our stuff is flying off the shelves. Our resales across 3 counties, our homes started but not finished and people lining up for new homes.
So all looks really rosy and sure-fire for my company and the lane we occupy. Which frankly, makes me really nervous, since there is no worst virus in economic life than the contagion of optimism. I tiptoe forward, with my ear to the tracks, my wetted finger judging the wind, my tossed grass clippings hinting the way. You may not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but you certainly need to think before you toss caution to the breeze in this environment. It could be the classic trap, the trap that catches every real estate speculator at least once in their career.
A life in real estate is like riding a motorcycle. There are two types of ridings. Those that have wrecked, and those that will. Same has been said about real estate speculators. There are those who have gone belly up at least once, and there are those that will.
At age 50, this might be my last economic cycle, and the last thing I want to do is digging myself out for the next decade of some overconfident doubling down.
Now, mind you. I'm definitely doubling down. I always double down. That's my nature. I just won't be over-confident doing it, and I'll be keeping my eyes on the exit routes when possible.
