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

Slow start to the summer season, with the June being a chilly then rainy month.  This 4th weekend doesn’t look that promising either, though it’s a tricky one as an employer, with the Holiday falling on Tuesday, you feel you should give the Monday off but you also feel you shouldn’t.  We just gave our team a 4 day Memorial Day weekend, so it’s hard to justify the same action a month later - we aren’t the Gov’t.

Lots of articles out about the decline in Airbnb bookings.  A little hard to get to the facts, since the headlines are focusing on the few big markets that are seeing a serious decline and making good headlines.  Airbnb in an article I read today is claiming only a 3% across their platform.  I’m sure each market has it’s own story, and the story of the Hudson Valley has always been unique.

I could dive into the stats - there are several publicly available databases which purport to shed light on the short term rental market (STR) - but I’ll leave that to someone else.  What I know, and of what I speak, is just general observations.

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My local banking colleagues have said they have scaled back on lending to these types of business plays.  It was clear to me that it seemed 2 out of every 3 people who bought a home up here were planning to rent it in order to offset their expenses.  And just like in the 60’s and 70’s when tourism in the Catskills was decimated by alternative choices, once again the main client of choice - the NY metro family - is back on the road, the air, able to get around and go where they want, post-covid.  Meaning, mostly, less local travel to the Hudson Valley.  Don’t get me wrong - it’s still a busy place since Covid.

I don’t follow Airbnb rates - and I’m not a big Airbnb patron - I like hotels - and

 I’m always shocked at how quickly a night room rate gets expensive.  Fees, cleaning, this, that, jeez.  $$225 turns into $360 before you know it and $400 become $600 before you blink twice.  And you only realize it once you’ve decided, reserved, gone thru all the hoops and ready to book.  It’s annoying.  And frankly, I’ve stayed in as many bad ones as good ones, and I don’t have the time or bandwidth to really figure out where value meets form best.  I know one thing - most of them are not what you see in the marketing and advertising.

What’s been interesting as I’ve been mulling over this pending student loan payback restart, is once again how predatory the lending environment is across the board.  72 months or more for car loans when a car loses half its value in 2 years.  Student loans with insane terms for very inexperienced borrowers.  Loans of all sorts - boats, motorcycles, RV, mortgages - being made to applicants without taking into consideration the paused student loan monthly payment obligations.    The student loan mess is criminal - those loans never should have been made in the fashion they were - and once again, you see how corrupt the system is - think about it, the system and lawmakers and colleges are so corrupt they are willing to shackle 2 generations of kids to endless and crippling and non-dischargeable loans.  There is no reason why kids with no borrowing history, credit score, or much of a clue should be able to borrow $10k, let alone $100k or more.    It’s disgusting.

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So kudos to Joe Biden for having this on his radar.  But, why put it on your radar and try and give some forgiveness while you are still allowing and making the exact same loans today?

Dave Ramsey is feeling some heat, and I know he’s feeling the heat because he feeling the need to be defensive, about his attacks on millennials and similar demographics for living at home and being cuddled.

This really articulate rednecky (at least that’s how is presenting himself) put out a tiktok that went viral, and continues to, countering Dave’s point that Millenials living at home are lazy, cuddled and need tough love.

This guy makes a great case that the Millenial generation has been dealt a pretty shitty hand of timing and luck.  First, they were victims of a predatory student loan program, perhaps the first group really exposed to the rising cost of college and the scams out there to pay for it.  2, that everyone was encouraging everyone to go to college, and ‘invest in yourself and your future’ and let’s admit it, not going was considered 2nd class.  3, when they came out, needing to pay off this big predatory debt and get a job, the deepest recession the country has seen since the great depression arrived, and lingered and languished for years.  Then, when they were hitting their early 30’s Covid, job losses, then inflation, then housing and rental prices that were 10x inflation compared to wages that rose incrementally.

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Taken all together - great recession, burdensome student debt, inflation, housing price increases - he makes a good point about the stresses and callouses this group has endured.  I can agree with him, and disagree - since I know of a few millenials who do live at home and carry around Louis V handbags and very nice clothes and cars.

He makes another great point when he points out how ‘easy’ we had it.  Dave Ramsey is a little older than me, but the system was more or less the same.  College was cheap, degrees were easy to get, Unions were strong and paid good wages to non-college grads, not going to college was not a black mark against you, starter homes could be had for $100k, health insurance was available and affordable.  You could fail for awhile and even end up succeeding because not everything was stacked against you.  

So it’s all pretty interesting, and why it’s so important to get information from varied sources and challenge your assumptions.  One day I was nodding my head in agreement with Ramsey, the next day I’m like Wow, Ramsey’s an idiot, and I end up somewhere in between.

One thing that is becoming clear to me - remote work is scary for the soul.  I’ve now met a few people who have been remote working for a few years, and I have to tell you, they really seem lost - they may or may not be able to do their job, but they are stuck in this anti-social, non-peer reviewed universe without the checks and balances that being in the office and out and about entails, and to be honest, it’s not healthy.    Like people or not, it’s important to be out there navigating them.  This one friend I met, works for a company, from home, that knows when she is in front of her computer and when she is not - so she literally sits at her kitchen table, alone, with her computer, with big brother monitoring her key strokes and time online - aware of every time she steps away - it was a truly frightening existence that was clear in her digressing social interactions.

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Wow, I don’t have student loans anymore, so I didn’t realize they were still being paused from Covid.  I guess they were paused almost immediately after the Pandemic started, but who would have known they still hadn’t kicked back in?  The reason I mention this is because I’m a financial literacy aficionado and know so many people in the ole USA really don’t really have a great understanding of their personal finances, and what certain decisions do and don’t do.

I mean, student loan repayments restarting - that’s a pretty big deal for a lot of people.  I’m not an expert on federal vs private loans, and nuances therein, but federal loans and interest on those loans were halted back in Spring of 2020. That’s 3 years ago, that people have not had to budget this very real expense into their budgets (not that that many people budget accurately).  And now the monthly bills are coming due, and they will be monthly bills for years if not decades.  

Dave Ramsey always uses the story of the twenty something or early 30’s living with their parents and using their incomes to buy designer handbags and going out to eat, postponing the very real reckoning of living on their own and the expenses and obligations therein (wow, used ‘therein’ twice in one blog post). I heard it on his podcast a bunch but just recently have I observed in real life, and that's the thing about Dave, his observations about people and their behaviors - he usually has some pretty good insight.

But jeez, if you were a family that was receiving pandemic aid, had their student loans paused, and received this and that pandemic handout - this is going to be a really rude wake-up call - and not short term.

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I guess all of this plays into the inflation story.  There’s lots of angles to the inflation story, but this is certainly one of them - that the average consumer with student loan debt didn’t have to pay that monthly payment so could spend $300-$1000 a month on ‘stuff’ - lord knows they didn’t save it.  Add in the Gov’t aid, and each and every individual had money in their pocket - some loose coin, some spending cash, some jingle jingle.  Besides the financial strain, it must just be depressing to know it’s coming.  And the habits of spending are hard to just give up - be it restaurants, handbags, beauty or whatever. It’s painful.

From what I read, credit card balances for individuals are growing, interest rates are up, student loans coming due.  I wonder how long it will take the decline in individual spending to show in macro economic data, and then relatedly, how long till it starts to bring down inflation because of slacking consumer demand.

Or will people not stop spending, borrow more for cars, take out home equity loans, fill up their credit cards until their is a real problem nationwide on the scale of the housing crisis of 2008, where it was clear something stank but everyone ignored it.

For my business, I’m not sure it matters.  My clients, and their respective social-economic position, it doesn’t seem that they are impacted or sensitive to interest rates, student loans, etc…  Whether they have a big lump sum sitting somewhere I don’t know - but I do know their monthly take-homes are pretty significant.

And as Dave Ramsey likes to say - it's the size of the hole (expenses and debt) versus the size of the shovel (income).

I know, I should be on the Central Bank Board of Governors.

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After a year of planning board meetings and requirements, after spending more than $150,000 in engineering, legal and surveying fees, I received in May the final approval of 9 building lots in one of the most sought-after areas perhaps in the country.

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I liked the Town of Olive Planning Board. I think they overdid some things that had little benefit to anyone, from an engineering perspective, but overall, a true cross-section of the community, with a fairness commitment to both the applicant and the community.

This low inventory environment is so because of all the NYC’ers who never found a home during Covid when demand spiked, compounded by the true lack of inventory, and the idea that no one who still wants to live upstate wants to trade houses because for the most part a lot of families are locked in at low interest rates.  7% instead of 3% is real money.  There’s a $1000 a month difference between a 3% loan and a 7% loan on a $600k house with $120k down (loan of $480K).

But at the same time, $1000 a month isn’t really the problem for new sales - the problem is inventory, priced sanely.  And that’s what we intend to supply.  I’m sure it will be a hit. The bank appraisals for my financing for each home have eye-poppingly elevated - elevated isn't the right word since it infers 'artificial' - but just what the market will bear.

I’m reading Hammer of the Gods, a 70’s book about Led Zeppelin.  I read it before, way back, but I needed something easy to read since I was having trouble with reading books and making progress, which is something that doesn’t make me happy since I’ve always been a reader.  One thing that stuck out to me was the fact that the main-stream music press ignored, disdained, underplayed the size of the impact, the crowds, and the achievements of Led Zeppelin.  Just didn’t write about them, or panned their music, or just gave them less due then was due considering they were outselling the Rolling Stones and blew the Beatles off the charts.  Part of the reason is they didn’t court the press, they didn’t cowtow, kiss ass, etc…  They were bad boys who played loud music and were a bit of heathens with the women.  

Catskill Farms, or actually me, I’m a bit the same way (sans the heathen with women part).  Whether it be Escape Brooklyn, or NYT’s, or a dozen leading pubs, we get ignored.  Why, because we are quantifiably the best selling outfit around, and have done it outside the traditional confines of how that is typically done.  Escape Brooklyn, which is literally a magazine directly targeting our audiences, won’t let us advertise in their publications even though we have best in class stuff.

Ashokan Acres -

Used to bug me, not that long ago really, but it turns out a saying I read not that long ago makes sense - in fact, 2 of them resonate with me.

'You never find haters that are doing better than you.'

And

'I light my way by the bridges I burn.'

It’s just my way, and I guess Ill come into this world and go out of it without really changing too much.

Or as Waylon Jennings liked to sing - ‘being crazy kept me from going insane.’

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Catskill Farms has been developing building sites, designing homes, building homes, and selling homes since 2001.  We have built over 300 across Sullivan, Ulster and Dutchess Counties.  Our clients are mostly NYC metro professionals, successful and with a good eye for design.

We are seeking a professional who can lead, can wear multiple hats, and is not afraid of jumping in across the design, construction and operations front.  This person is supported by a full staff of day to day operations staff, in the office and remote.  The job requires a ‘can do, can figure it out, no job is not my job’ small business mind set.   Waking each morning ready for whatever challenges come their way is critical.  Not for wallflowers.

Some specific skills that are helpful include MS Office proficiency from Word, Excel, Powerpoint.   Comfort with Revit is helpful but not necessary.  Google Drive, email organization and general software comfort level required.  The successful applicant will be uber-organized, with an ADHD need to maintain and spread that organizational habit across the company.

Familiarity with construction and the work and product flow of a new residential home build is essential.

This is an in-office position, Monday - Friday, 8-5pm.   It pays $100k+, comes with retirement and healthcare, and a 24/7 use of a car.

This is a busy company building legacy homes across the Hudson Valley.   The successful applicant will see their work built across a large swath of the gold coast of the Hudson Valley.

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