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

That Chinese man who - many centuries or millennia ago-  coined the phrase to 'pray that you live an interesting life' would be proud of me.  Life really doesn't get a whole lot more interesting, a least for a small-town guy.

First, there was a first, which is rare after 20 years in the business - a woman who was in labor was negotiating to secure the rental of my home past.   She wrote, 'I'm in labor, but we will take it, and we are such a nice family, etc..., just give me a day or two!".  It's a tough market out there, and you have to act in order to secure.  Nothing lasts.  That heroic effort pushed her to the front of the line.

I have a few rentals and it appears I'm using them to find good families in need of good shelter, and giving them first dibs.  Last year, continuing to the present, was a West Point family of 5 plus dog from the South.  I agreed to a reasonable rent, and then extended the term in a flexible way.  This year, a neat family who is fleeing NYC and sending their child to the Homestead.  It's cool to be able to help - it's not charity by any means, but it is a thoughtful prioritizing of applicants - starting with renting for longer-term in a market that is full of short term rentals but light on longer terms.

Then, the Rev. Laurie Stuart, publisher of the River Reporter, agreed to a 'mea culpa', pretty high profile 'editorial apology' for letting some mean letters to the editor about me be published.  The paper is and has been anti-anything Petersheim for a decade, 1, because I'm progressive, politically engaged articulate and not prone to bandwagens, 2, call out their foolishness (while still believing local newspapers are the life-blood a healthy community) on probably more occasions than is polite, 3, I think the old editor was just plain jealous of how his life stacked up to mine, especially since his probably had a headstart and he toed the line of community homogeneousness, while I moved fast and broke everything in sight.  The mean letters detailed my 'behavior in the community', like a guy who starts with a penny and ends up investing over $100m in a community is mis-behaved.  Hopeful (and vocal) that a rising tide may lift many boats, but misbehaved?  Ridiculous.  It was one of those 'qualified' reversals that get mocked in when someone does it on the big stage, but it was a start and I appreciated it.  Baby steps.

Granted, maybe some mis-steps but who's perfect?!?!  Although being outspoken does put an easy target on your back, especially in when you add in social media.  It takes a real willingness to be blooded and punched and kicked and ostracized and mis-interpreted.  I know enough about history to know that the way forward is not for the meek or gun shy.

As Senator Tammy Duckworth recently wrote  -"In a nation born out of an act of protest, there is nothing more patriotic than standing up for what you believe in, even if it goes against those in power."

Interestingly, all the current meany pants letters started when I wrote one criticizing a school board member Kristin Smith for thinking she needed to use her platform to chime in on a debate on whether some local moron had the right to fly a gigantic confederate flag in a high profile location.  My point was simple and sweet - the rights you have that you refrain from using are as important as the rights you have that you choose to use, - in fact, this may actually define the fabric of the community in which you live.  My point was also pretty simple - if she thought reminding people that you have the right to fly a confederate flag was somehow an impressive display of constitutional knowledge, she was mistaken.  We all learned that in 1st grade.  And you wouldn't believe all the panties that got tied in a knot after I said that.

But, to be honest, I am an alien in the community in which I live.  With generations of economic decline all around me - with the decline of the borscht belt and the related real estate and hospitality industry, which started in earnest in the mid-1970's - I plopped out nowhere and sort of built a small scale empire, an affront to all those wading in the 'can't be helped, can't be improved' swamp of rural America for the last 40 years.

It's tough to really explain what economic decline does to the soul of a community.  It grows unambitious, it grows complacent at the lowest common denominator, it grows physically unhealthy, it begins not to hope or help the next generation, academics slide, culture slides, people grow fat; improvement is a foreign, frightening and threatening word.

Which got me thinking about community.  Most people who can choose their communities carefully.  It's where their family is, it's where their job is, it's where the good schools are.  As you slide up the income scale, it's where the day to day interactions are invigorating, the opportunities varied, and manners are acknowledged.

Personally, I got caught in no mans land.  I wasn't from Eldred NY (pop 1500)  I didn't really know anyone, I had nothing in common with the local community, and my life experiences, built-in ambition and eager to always improve left me nearly at polar opposites to the priorities of my community.  But I had a business niche of building and selling homes to new yorkers (who liked the ruralness and had plenty of life-blood action back in the city) that kept me there for 15 years, raging against the inanity of 'spiteing ones nose off your face on a daily basis', having my soul unwatered by a sort of community cultural or educational ambivalence, a mean-spiritedness borne of failure, or at least borne of lack of improvement.

Seriously, the mismatch was insane - you have a tireless entrepreneur building one of the most dynamic companies in the Hudson Valley- every day waking up with people to pay, problems to solve, ventures to start- juxtaposed against a spiritless ooze of rusted complacency.  It's one thing to motivate when you are motivated and inspired by those around you, it's another to motivate in a vacuum, to have to draw it all from within.  

One easy measure of what I'm talking about is our local school, pop. 400.  Eldred's schools have declined over the last decade from neat little rural school to a place that underachieves on every State metric, be it academics, athletics, preparation for college, attendance to college, culture.  My efforts and others have dumped tax revenue into this school for decade-plus and all we have to show for it is a bloated pay, benefit and retirement package for the teachers who are leaving the kids short.  It's frustrating.  It doesn't improve, in fact, it's sort of anti-improvement.  It's also very unhealthy for me - you can starve your mental well-being if you are not careful and dollars in your pocket does very little to alleviate being surrounded by blah.

That said, and I doubt I'm done with that, on a biz front, just a ton going on.

I accepted offer on these three little guys this week.  2 with multiple bids.  2 in Saugerties, 1 in Callicoon NY.


This one in Milan in NY is fully reserved.

And 4 more in Saugerties, and another in Kerhonkson, and another in Olivebridge and the phone doesn't stop ringing, though I stopped picking it up weeks ago.

I'm starting to see something very clearly in my future - a Pool.


or maybe -

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For condos/townhouses, sales dropped 59.3% to 1,875 in South Florida. Throughout the state, sales of condos/townhouses declined 50.3%.  I sold a neat bay front unit in February, for less than I wanted but for a lot more than I could now.  For all the good real estate stories I had, this was not one of them.  The Worst board of directors - really put the 'da' in Florida.  And all the construction down there trying to stave off the sunny day flooding was worrisome.

For leisure, I just finished listening to "Churchill: Walking with Destiny" which the WJS says ""Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain's savior."   I drive a lot, and like long tombs, and this one was 50 hours plus.   The thing about Churchill is that he failed as much, as he succeeded - just so happened that he succeeded at something monumental.  The book argues his success was impossible with the trial and errors of his failures.

Happy 4th by the way.

I'm reading a 1400 page book by Norman Mailer about the mid-50's CIA call Harlot's Ghost.  I like it, but it's a long book, maybe the longest I've tackled.  Sometimes as I make my way through it I wonder about the opportunity cost of this book, and what else I'm not reading, but I typically finish every book I start just out of habit and discipline.

I'm also meandering my way through a drawing course on the Great Courses site.  It's going slow, but it's good.  I've always wanted to sketch well, and I think I have it in me, but as of right now, not putting in the time to make a real difference.  Other than reading, which I do voraciously from all formats - computers, newspapers, books magazines.   Whenever I think I'm smarter than half the people I run into, I always reflect if it's just the fact that I read more, a lot more, and hence thus have a lot of other people's intelligence to pull from.

And I'm watching a Great Courses lecture on the Great Plague of the 1400's where half the people in Europe died.  They say that came from China too!!  Fucking Trump.  I always like to go back and read similar experiences in history when we hit a bump, be it a plague, a recession, a boom, or a bad president.  Few things don't have historical parallels.

Trump's such a non-reader that when he defended the 'builders of our country' during his speech in South Dakota, defending them against the current BLM movements, he probably didn't even realize that that is the exact point of the awakening - that the people who actually did some of the building, or actually most of the building - were never recognized, compensated, allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted to build anything, etc...

If it wasn't such bad humor, I would call this breakfast I had at the Otesaga in Cooperstown last week "White Privilege', and in normal times you could get away with it, since joking about difficult moments in cultural history used to help solve the problem, define it, and bring some sort of insight into the issue, but that's dangerous right now.  I think I can and will do it, since at the sparsely populated hotel there was an indian family, a black family, me and my bearded friend John and this really loud guy who was talking about the nudist retreat he and his wife just returned from.  It's my blog, and if I want to write about stream of consciousness thoughts, then I will.

I made Lucas ride around with me for a few days last week and he was introduced to the wide variety of tasks that make up my day.  We also opened up his first bank account at Jeff Bank, my bank for the last 20 years.  He dumped $1300 bucks he had accumulated - $650 from chores, and the other $500+ from savings bonds from the 1980's I had forgotten I had.  The Savings Bonds were interesting because they cost $125 and 30 years later they were worth $550.  The beauty of compound interest, even at 1.5%.  George Kinne, the president of the bank stopped by to welcome the new client, as did Bryan Flynn from the commercial lending department.

That's me on the right.  No hair cut for months, too much drinking showing in the obvious spots, though some is that is because I found I love French Vanilla coffee creamer.

Issac and Nancy at a farmhouse I renovated in 2004 and was all packed ready to move in with my wife until Nancy came by and made a full price offer, much to the chagrin of her husband.  They are both retired now, and act like it, not wearing shoes, and in no hurry to go anywhere.

I hired the star running back and star qb from DVHS to give 4 weeks of private training from last years championship eagles team.  Should be fun.

Whenever lucas has friends over I always make them do a cross fit like workout.  Lucas does it most days.  Rowing, jump rope, burpees, and some weight work.  Some of these kids haven't seen a shirt in weeks.  We are laying pretty low this weekend, and I'm very impressed with NY's ability to crush the curve.  Cuomo followed the science, and I'm not a big fan, but he nailed it.

And a big bear visited the other morning.  Literally just him and me, 3' apart, separated by a think sheet of glass.  A big bear.

Not sure if I posted this story about the PPP program from the River, a local source of great micro journalism.
https://therivernewsroom.com/ppp-lifesaver-with-a-lot-of-headaches/

And the WSJ inclusion -
https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/the-housing-market-around-new-york-city-is-booming-140181

I could go on and on about the real estate market, but it is so busy with buyers that hardly any hyperbole could be considered exaggerated.

Upstate has lots of different meanings, as does 'the catskills'.  There is a geographical boundary, at least for the Catskills, and then there is the 'state of mind' boundary.  For instance, a lot of what what we call the Catskills isn't really in 'the catskills', defined by the State charter/designation.   Counties such as Sullivan and Dutchess lay outside the Catskills and even towns like Stone Ridge, Kerhonkson etc... are not in the Catskills proper, but certainly in the Catskills for both descriptive ease and marketing ease.

Same goes for Upstate.  Upstate literally runs from the Catskills to Buffalo, in concentric rings of furtherness.  I just took a 3 day journey into the middle of the State over the last few days that brought this salient fact home to roost.  Hamilton NY - home of Colgate Uk, Vernon NY - home to Turning Stone Golf resort, and now today we are in Cooperstown - home to more than one would think, including baseball hall of fame, Leatherstocking Golf Course, James Fennimore Cooper and one of the prettiest downtown villages I've seen in a while.

One thing for sure, NY is vast, and it is beautiful, with pockets of wealth and poverty seemingly mixed in at random.

The impacts of the Virus are pronounced, as I can see with mine own eyes, and for a small business guy like myself, alarming.  In this Central NY phase 3 reopening area, the extent the hotels and restaurants are obeying and enforcing the rules is impressive.  6' separation, masks for sure, seating arranged by the book, cooperation from guests and staff.  You can see why NY has succeeded for now in flattening the curve and eliminating the spread.

With the virus shutting down a lot of sports, we've been doing a lot of road biking this season, which is a lot of fun.  But unless you are retired or something, you can't do both road biking and golf, since they take up a chunk of time each.  So golf got shelved, and to 'get it out of our system', we hit 3 upstate courses in 3 days, riding in the '72 Malibu.

Leatherstocking, Cooperstown

Colgate U Course.

The Ostesaga Inn, in Cooperstown.

Turning Stone Indian Reservation golf course.

You can also see the distress of small towns and their associated main street businesses; you can see the big resorts, empty, with 5 staff laid off for every one still working.  Empty main streets, empty restaurants, empty parking lots, empty golf courses, empty hotels.  And these are the areas considered a success.

Translates into lack of jobs, lack of sales tax revenue, lack of real estate swaps, lack of enthusiasm, and lack of cash flow from anything from non-profits to small biz to gigantic resorts.  I frankly don't know how this ends, because I am up close and personal with dozens of small businesses everyday, and while they were not impacted, it's a clear window into the short runway to disaster that many of them would face in the face of such a slow down and shut down.  They aren't packing oodles of rainy day funds.  They don't have a 'what if we have to close in the busiest months of the year' plan.  They don't have a 'how to make money with our tables half full'.

So, best case, that vast federal aid helped to keep them afloat.  But then you have the idea of 'zombie' companies, typically applied to larger companies kept afloat with large government bond buying, and low interest rates, can also apply to much smaller companies, where new debt is high, sales are lower, and the businesses aren't reinvesting, growing, hiring - they are just there, zombie-like, wandering aimlessly through the fog of the final economic consequences of the virus, until they fade away, debt-laden and ruined.  The question then, is this the opening for the creative destruction that makes our way of life tick - in with new out with the old - or this something different.  Either way, it doesn't seem quick, and it doesn't seem like it will help with the wealth and opportunity gap of this country.

That being said, Catskill Farms is once again positioned well, so I have a bit of survivor's guilt, but not too much.  Only thing I hate, is there is so much demand in the marketplace that sales come a little too easy and so my competition will grow, and take our overflow.  I like it best when it's harder and I can watch others in my industry get it all wrong.  That may be a character flaw, but one of the few I'm not trying to improve on.

The red velvet rope has been strung in front of shingle, and we've come to the tough decision to turn off the 'welcome aboard' sign.  We've been busy before, and we are good at it - in fact there is a good argument that we - like a fast car or a racing horse - operate better fully employed and engaged and firing on all cylinders, you got to know when to say when, for the benefit of those you are building with now, and those homes you have finished that you owe service to.  It's the benefit and advantage of being an established, mature and experienced company - you know what you are capable of, and there is no shame in stretching that, but not to the breaking point.

A letter that went out last week to people contacting us via our inquiry form -