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

In August of 2001, I was picked up in some outdated oversized car from a part-time realtor connected with The Rural Connection.  The Rural Connection was/is a real estate company that had a small window front shop on Barrow Street, that advertised farms, houses, and other assorted abodes for unheard of prices, even back then. We are talking $140k for a farm and 40 acres.  I bought my first house - a 400 sq ft wonder built into and on top of a rock ledge way back when - we called it the Rock House - I bought it for $24k, and I bought it with one of those credit card blank checks that used to come in mail.  Randy Florke - model, designer, married to eventual NY Congressman Sean Maloney - was the pied piper broker who painted rural dreams in vibrant colors.

So I was picked up by a gentleman, and he showed some homes and probably hit on me, and I picked one abandoned, partly through a remodel, with a steep short undriveable drive to the home in Cochecton NY.  It was listed at $32k, and was owned by I Have a Dream Foundation based in NYC, having received it as a donation of sorts from someone.

I was living in NYC at the time; this was one month or less before 9/11.  I had zero for money, had just a few months earlier been laid off by the Shooting Gallery, an enterprising independent film company before independent film companies proliferated.  It employed the sons of Henry Kravis and other sons of wealthy families, families whose offspring not only came with ‘film ideas’ but ready cash from family trusts to finance the Shooting Gallery films, including such early winners such as Sling Blade and the earliest and youngest Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me.  Such funds were immediately deployed by the fast-talking co-founder Steve Carlis - you can still find him on the internet long after the high point, still with the same bio picture. His creative partner - Steve was the money and fund-raiser - his creative partner, Larry Meistrich.

Film companies attracted a very strange crowd back then, everyone excited to be in film business, half looking for their break.  CJ Follini’s mom bought his way in to manage the creative commercials division but stuck in ‘facilities’ dealing with primadonnas complaining about being hot or cold.  I worked directly for CJ (and if I had half a brain this could have been a train I followed to the top). Carlis was a master of promising one thing and delivering another. You can do that and get away with in film, since everyone just wants to be close up to it.

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I was dating, or had recently broken up with Mara Buxbaum, a PR agent to the stars, trained under the best, Leslie Dart (this is a guess) and then off on her own with a trifecta partnership at idPR, which was a huge hit. I used to hang with Eddie Burns, Sean Penn, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and was in the room when Nicole Kidman called our apartment early one Sunday morning in a tizzy about some death or divorce. Michelle Williams was a pet project who credits Ms Buxbaum with both sage career advice and friendship when it counted, especially through the Heath Ledger drug death. I remember being at Al Pacino's NYC pad and asking him what his opening move in a chess game was, as he had a chess board set up prominently.

It's fair to ask how I got caught up in all that and the simple answer is my pure animal magnetism caught a whole host of unsuspecting upper class women in my web of unreadiness. If I had 1/10 the game of Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley I could have really made something of myself

Anyways, back to me!  So, somehow I’m in contract to buy this house at age 31, having visited Sullivan County exactly once.  I had no car, no plan, little in the way of money.  But, unemployed and idle hands are the devil's playthings.

9/11 then happens, and I’m on the 11th floor or something of the new (at the time) Scholastic HQ on Prince Street in SoHo, and had a window framed view of both planes.  Stay in the building, or go to the street? What was safer?

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I got down the site early on 12th. As I got closer I found a yellow Con Ed jumpsuit, throw it on, and explored the area for 6 hours. Sometimes in the bucket line removing debris, other times off on my own climbing stairs in a damaged building that could fall, with all the sirens and alarms of all the buildings around ringing their individual songs. Pre-cell phones - these are camera photographs.

In this picture below, at one of the adjacent buildings, empty, destroyed I came across this scene, which seems similar to the one above - life, interupted, mid-stroke.

But look harder at them- who is drinking beer at 9am the morning of the attacks - No One before the attacks? This was a resting place and retreat of some crew of fireman or police workers or whoever was dowe there breathing that dust moving concrete of 100 story buildings by a 5 gallon bucket through a chain of 100 men. The above, a genial breakfast scene unyet disturbed in their morning routine. Below, at least for a moment, held a crew of men looking out on the unfathomable, after working without pause in the pile. Having a beer, on the house, fraternizing, in a small bunker, beside Ground Zero.

More than once, an alarm would sound and the concrete mountain of men would scramble - the makeshift alarm indicated another building might fall, and we would all run in a slow random direction over the uneven concrete.

I have a lot of memories of that span of time. - August and September, 2001. The tech market crashed, startups collapsing all around, terrorist attacks - all in America's densest city, a ringside seat to history. One memory was auditory - the lack of sirens, even though first responder vehicles from States around showed up to help. Thousands of emergency vehicles, and not a siren. There were no rescues that day.

Turns out, I’m still wired to the 5am-7pm days. Still wired to get out to the job sites when they are quiet on Saturday and Sunday mornings and make some notes and lists and action items.  Still able to make accurate market predictions as it appears our 3 homes for sale being snatched up and deal pendings in the first 3 weeks of the new year - like I suspected, a slow market in the fall was just a pause as the election dust settled and the corporate bonuses figured.

The above pic is a house we are building in North Branch, it's a heating 'ear' fueled with propane, that is kept on low. It was about 6:45 am and was giving off a pre-dawn glow. Somewhat spooky, somewhat cool - the burners give off a hissing, and smell lightly of propane.  I typically use all my senses when entering a house - sight, smell, sound, aware of my feet and any nails, or seams or flex in the floors. It's hard to teach what I know, and to do it well would mean having someone attached to my hip for 6 months as a I go about my daily routines, and being somewhat of a loner, that sounds like a real not-fun scenario. And honestly, unless you are paying for this shit, it's hard to be as invested as I am in troubleshooting. Thing is, with the size we are as a business, I can still move the needle on what comes into my pockets by paying close attention to the operation's details.

The incredibly tight inventory is juxtaposed with buyers not in a rush and  sticking close to their calibrated first offers. It’s an interesting marketplace with a lot of the new construction spec building hard to find now, both a product of the lack of land available for speculative purposes and lots of new entrants into the business of building homes without a buyer pre-arranged exiting with their tail between their legs as the finicky marketplace teaches hard lessons.

Looks like we are going into contract on the house below.

But there’s a black swan event developing for the local marketplace and that’s the fires out west.  It is easy to envision the professionally displaced coming East for a bit to let things play out out there, and they will need housing and maybe once again as in 2020-early 2023, everyone in the housing market Upstate will look smart as buyers swamp and swallow up every home for sale.  The shock is too new to lend credibility to this market guess, but I feel it’s hard to think that it won’t add buyers to the Market.

It’s -12 degrees in Parksville, near Livingston Manor.  It’s -6 in Milford, in NE PA.   My son is dying for the diesel engines of the buses to have trouble starting.  I’m not sure why- I guess out of principle of being a kid - he actually loves his school and his friends. We had a nice snow storm on Sunday pre MLK day. Lulu tracks in the snow.

It’s been 2 years of struggle to remake the company after my right-hand woman lieutenant left but I feel I’m on the precipice of finalizing it.  It’s been tough - as tough as anything I’ve ever done - can’t say more tough, since some of the rows I’ve hoed have been extraordinarily tough, but not easy, and definitely not easy since I was a bit exhausted from the Covid sprint.  But like David Goggins, or the Navy Seals BUDD camps - you can’t count on the finish line - you need to leave some gas in the tank at all times since there is no predictability to business building or business sustainment.  

Looking out over the Delaware River from NE PA, Milford.

Planning our ski trip to the 3 Valleys in France Alps.

Ran around to most of my houses the end of last week into the weekend. -

Taking Lucas to the Eagles-Commanders game this Sunday.

Really pivoting here - a blog post mostly about our Homes, actually the point of the blog when you get right down to it.  I hit the ground running, post New Years, and the office team punched out a lot of work getting a few houses up on the website, and getting them listed on the SuCo and Ulster MLS’s.  Always a reasonably heavy lift between the house deets, the pics, the floor plans - each needing a bit of fine tuning and tech tweaking.  First text 5am, last email 7pm. I put in 14 hr days like Barkley runs downfield.

 I launched a google ads words campaign, which I haven’t done in years (or at least haven’t done much of it in years). Didn’t really need to recently-we were sold out.  But with a few things to sell, I thought I’d run a campaign and see how it goes.  Besides possibly selling some homes, you get a lot of other information from these campaigns, indirectly, after you sort through a lot of red-herrings and false flags. But, if you’ve been at it long enough, you can tease out some information from the data and traffic.  Such as the volume of traffic to the ads can correlate to the activity in the marketplace, ie people looking for a home. I’ve been saying for a few months I thought this first quarter was going to be busy as the dust settled from the election, bonuses are paid out after a very good year, and inventory remains tight but life keeps going. The fires in LA could provide an additional stimulus to the marketplace over the next 3 months, as bi-coastal businesses bring their employees east. Whether your home burns down or not, the region is fundamentally changed, forever, and not for the better. Asheville, St Petes, LA. LA is a test of the ability of us humans to not change in the face of creeping horror.

I guess interest rates are ticking up, but I’m not sure what that really means to our clients, many who could put down more down payment than they need to, and seem to enjoy the mortgage tax deduction (though I’m not sure if that’s a thing anymore though Trump might be more amendable with Republican pressure - the SALT deduction elimination was really at the time a poke in the eye to blue states) and arbitraging their investment strategies and their mortgage payments.  I’m thinking of offering some owner-financing on one or more of the houses I have for sale, and earn the interest, avoid the lump sum tax hit, etc… I like to do this, but have only successfully done it once or twice.  It’s a nice annuity per se, revenue stream.

So let’s get to it know and talk about the elephant in the room, the houses I design, build and sell.  It’s no wonder I’m such an oddball - I don’t know anyone else in my immediate peer group, family group, or casual friend group who goes out and makes million dollar mistakes and decisions and just chalks it up to ‘good college try’.  I mean, every house I decide to build on a certain plot of land either maximizes my ROI, or it doesn’t.  And you can’t run from the truth. It’s there for you to see everyday.  Everyday I get my ass whipped in one manner or another, and that’s just because that’s the nature of small business, and small business decision-making, and being a speculator who thinks he can gauge the marketplace and add something valuable to it. You get some really right, you some really wrong, you knock it out of the park and you go down swinging.  You get some really great opportunities out of the blue just because you are in the game and those gifts feel earned for all the bad stuff that happens that’s unnecessary.

‍Barn 56 in Olivebridge, listed at $1.150,000 through the Upstate Curious group, is a fine house with 3 beds, 2 full baths, 2 half baths, a killer master suite, a container pool and a two car garage.  We don’t really play a lot in this price range, but the houses we are putting up and the market in the area (Ulster Cty) is incredibly vibrant and seem to be worth it when compared to other sales.

https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/homes/ashokan-acres-olive-ny-ulster-county-real-estate-barn-56

‍Barn 53, a mid-sized barn, with 4 modest bedrooms and 3 full bath sits on a pretty cool piece of land.  We built a little studio the land as well.  It’s a great house on a great piece of land - if I could do it over I’d build a Ranch.  People dig the Ranches.  They dig all the houses but the Ranches are crowd-pleasers. $849k

https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/homes/ashokan-acres-olive-ny-ulster-county-real-estate-barn-53

Ranch 71 -  a small 2 bedroom house on 5 acres is fun.  I love these little houses.  Just outside Narrowsburg. $399k.

https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/homes/ranch-71

‍Ranch 72 is one of large Ranches, and this one is on 22 rugged acres.  The house is going to have killer views.  This is North Branch/Fremont of SuCo, just north of Callicoon. $899k.

https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/homes/ranch-72

That’s what we got for sale. Prices subject to change. We have 3 ‘our homes your land’ projects coming up, or partially started.  Should be a good predictable year.

I've been reflecting- at first glance there seems to be 4 distinct phases of life- 1, growing up, 2, discovery (20-30), 3, In it (kids families careers), 4, reflection. Amazed at how that season of hustle and bustle passes and the next generation enters the mix of it. When I think I've got a good 25 years left, and then look back at what I was doing at 29, I gotta say I'm looking forward to knowable stretch in front of me.

I asked the question to myself after taking most of the month of December 'off' - monitoring for my needed daily intervention, pushing things ahead, but definitely off for a lot of the month - so the question was, will I be able to kickstart those rocket engines to kick it back into gear and breathe the fire necessary to keep this show running - well, the answer was not long in coming, the first hint of the answer was the 4:30am text to some subcontractors, and a 14 hr workday on January 2nd. So it's nice to have that important question answered.

But seriously, there were problems to solve everywhere, mostly weather related as the temps rose to 50 degrees and dropped to -5. I think I talked about this last post, but then it happened, and the 50 degree day I thought would be perfect to get a foundation poured turned out to be a total new year shit show of stuck cement trucks and inaccessible sites, since the warm weather and rain pulled the frost out of the ground and made for impassable soggy mess of driveways. So this foundation in Parksville I've be wrestling with will now have to wait another few weeks for a break in the weather since it appears to be cold the next few weeks.

I guess in some ways that's why it's important to go with a stable professional company that wasn't rushing things just for cash flow reasons and pouring the concrete in suspect temps. My eyes are on the ball, always. And as Dave Ramsey says, it's the not being invited over for Thanksgiving Dinner that's the test of a successful business, it's are you earning their hard-earned dollar? That's the test, the only test, and that test we have passed for 24 years.

Well, I wasn’t the only one contemplating the horror of speaker phone use.  The day I wrote my piece in this blog, the WSJ covers the same topic, in much the same way. I mean, the issue is a bit complicated since some times people are sharing a video and watching together, but in the end, listening without headphones should not be normalized, and should be no better than belching or farting in public. Parents take note.

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I’m down here in Florida, and it’s just busier, so maybe that’s why it stood out to me, but what is true is that is a lot of older people are working in Walmart, Lowes, Home Depots, etc…    And they are working nights, holidays.  Not that these aren’t good jobs that actually pay decent, but to see people 75+ manning the registers, stocking shelves, roaming the sales floor - that’s one bad event to homelessness or something else nasty.  We don’t have homeless in NE PA where I live, so it’s always shocking to see the extent of it in the USA, especially in some of the temperate climates like St Petes.  I remember a few years ago it’s the only thing I could talk about after visiting San Diego and Venice in CA.

I went down the 22nd and flew Lucas and 2 friends down on the 27th till New Years. They made the most of it, with a lot of late night roof top jacuzzi, swims, and workouts. (maybe I've written this)

The top floor Unit turned out great, but like I've said before, the process I'm experiencing makes it clear how good and attentive we are at we do at Catskill Farms, which only happens with the interest, attention and action of the Owner.

Note the pretty good bed making of the boys - I was pretty strict about keeping the place clean, and not stinky, sweaty and sticky.

We watched the Penn State - Boise game NYE at a restaurant/bar, got there before it was too crowded but as the night ticked on it started filling up with young revelers and I think that was eye-opening for the young pups as the sprightly young women in their New Year's get-ups started rubbing up close. I was tempted to ask a few of them to come over and flirt just to see the shock of the kids, but didn't get the chance. I did do a jello shot, which was good.

It’s always been clear that the insurance policy and rates and coverage would be the first shoe to drop to actually take seriously the changing planet’s weather, since they are about numbers - actuaries - not politics, and the numbers just weren’t going to work at some point with the increased frequency of disaster, and now on top of that, just how gosh dang expensive everything is to rebuild and replace.  I feel I delved into this a few weeks back, but it’s happening all over - insurance coverage is getting stingy, and lots of policies in lots of places just aren’t getting renewed, making the job of insurance broker unenviable and you constantly are breaking the bad news to people who really didn’t want to be focusing in on their insurances to begin with.

The Credit Score is so stupid.  And I wrote that before I just read an article about it today - I don't know why I'm so timely with my thoughts!! Seriously, what good is a metric that doesn’t include your income?  Or your cash in bank?  Or your net worth?  Just some silly debt analysis of how much you could borrow on your credit sources already secured vs how much you actually have borrowed.  I know loan underwriting then looks at this with income, etc…, but on it’s own, the score itself, has little relationship to ability to pay.  I mean, I’m pretty sure my 795 is a whole lot better than a lot of 795s, but why I’m not 850 I have no idea.  I mean, few have used credit as aggressive as I have over a long period of time, and few have the steller of literally never being late , and few have the income or accrued assets, but I’m pretty sure my 795 is right up there with people with mortgages, kids in college, credit card debt and living almost paycheck to paycheck (even among high earners.).  Not the same boat t’all. The article I read today was one man's attempt to get an 850 score, a perfect score and in order to do it he jiggered around with a bunch of non-important items like percent of credit used vs available (1.5% was his answer), when you pay the bill every month (he found the 15th), etc... and eventually, as an engineer, he played around with enough to inch it up. But the point is, it wasn't about his credit-worthiness at all.

My to do list next week -

1. Get my last Barn house listed next week with a real estate company.
2. Lower my price on mid-sized barn in Olivebridge
3. List my mini-ranch on the MLS.
4. Get the wall coverings up on a CR 24, a new Ranch with killer views.
5. Finish up a build contract for Large Barn in North Branch
6. Finish up a build contract for Ranch in New Paltz
7. Payroll
8. Hire a book-keeper for the office.
9. And a bunch of nickel and dime issues and projects that add up once all counted.

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