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

I was just thinking about the development differences of me and my son, as I was reading about retiring in the South Of France (dream not reality) and was thinking about a girl I met on Martha’s Vineyard who I exchanged letters with, and I would wait for those letters, day after day, walking to the mailbox at lunch of the farm in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard.  I remember at the height of our correspondence in the summer of ‘91, where my words tumbled onto the page, into an envelope, off to her mother’s home in Ohio.

She was the scion of a large mid-west banking family, attending Brown, and farming, like me, in the summers on the blue-blood enclave.  I would send those letters, and she would return hers, and the turnaround was weeks, with no expectation or knowledge of when a letter might drop.  Just a daily anticipation and then the infrequent arrival of a letter, which slowly faded to black as one of the writers lost the passion of the correspondence. This happened on Morning Glory Farm.

The dopamine drip of waiting on a letter is a lot different than opening your phone and sending a text or receiving a text, a notification, etc…  And I got to wondering on this Friday morning how that changes our wiring - learning to wait versus getting quick feedback.  In my business at least, and I think life in general, there is a benefit to having a muscle trained that knows how to wait, can navigate the impulses of ‘now’, is comfortable in the vast unknown.

Even for those of us raised in the pre-tech era, we have been pretty much re-conditioned to need immediacy and it takes a concerted effort to turn the devices off, power down go tech-dark, even for a few hours in the evening.

But the waiting on a letter that you don’t even know if it was ever sent, walking to the mailbox where you have that 2 second anticipation as you open the mailbox door before most times being disappointed, that’s a unique type of waiting and seeing.  I guess the point is a little bit - we used to have a lot more low-simmering disappointment woven into each moment of each day, when things weren’t at our fingertips, we did not live in the malleable and marginally phony online instagram world.

But even today, I remember those walks to the mailbox with a mixture of memory and shame for the unrequited nature of that one-sided letter-oriented romance with a girl way out of my league, which faded on its own timeline.

We are getting a lot of construction done.  But now it’s wet, and the sun isn’t shining, so it stays wet and saturated.  We need a week of sunshine.  But nevertheless, progress is everywhere.

It will be a big year of construction productivity.  I don’t know about construction profits yet; that we will have to wait and see, but if things come together, if the sales market rewards us for the risks we are taking, then it shall be a banner year.

Even if not a banner year, with the deals we have in place at this early juncture in the year, it will be a manageable busy year, and that's the worst case scenario.  I’m bringing $4m of new homes for sale to the market so there better be some buyers out there!  I’ve cashed out my stock market non-retirement accounts and brought this money back into the business so I can cushion my risks without borrowing at the cost of $8k-$12k a month.  Even though my business and my personal finances are separate, they all funnel to my personal net worth/wealth bottomline, so a dollar saved in interest wherever is a dollar more in my pocket.  With the world acting crazy, I doubt my market returns will be larger and expected to exceed my interest costs of 7+%. 

I remember sitting in the Starbucks in New Paltz in 2015 just reading the business pages of some newspaper and some whipper snapper University kid interrupts me and tells me to ‘buy crypto’.  I brushed him off of course, and of course he was right.  I could have been an early adopter even if I wasn’t ‘all in’.  The one caveat there would be there would be zero chance I didn’t lose or misplace my codes, passwords and security strings, causing imaginable grief at the locked up and untouchable bitcoin appreciation.

I was also at the table when AI was first being discussed mainstream with a girlfriend who worked at a startup in 2022

And I was sitting in the perfect seat for both cell phones and the internet in 1994-2002, as well as the Iphone, etc…

I think going forward I will be a little more open to these conversations I hear, and perhaps make small investments and let them sit and grow or fail.  You don’t have to be a believer and always right about these things to hedge your skeptical nature and make small bets on the future.

I got my wish - a cold but dry week that allowed a lot of progress.

First bicycle ride of the year with gear head from local bike store Xavier.

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The problem with being impatient about winter ending is then you have March, which is a most unfriendly month of teaser nice days, then smack in the face cold, windy wet days.  Whenever it dries out just enough to start getting optimistic about progress, bam, it’s gone.  And since the sun doesn’t shine and it remains Ireland damp, it stays wet, damp and untraversable for a while.  Last night, with the worst possible timing, a Sunday night before the work week, a heavy rain started around 7pm and lasted till 9am this morning.

I’m an AI user, Chatgpt, though the smart set was making me feel guilty for using Chat and not Claude, or something less dominant in the marketplace - like Claude is the new Apple and Chat is Microsoft - unhip, uncool, AI for Facebook users.  That’s baloney - it’s a great product and judging by simple login issues with Claude, the elite tastemakers of AI can kiss my ass.

The world is getting interesting, and the impact of gas prices will mean something to someone, though what it is is hard to know for certain.  Since I’m getting busy and needed some cash flow/equity investment cushion, I cashed out of a sizable equity (non-retirement) position to infuse into the business for the next wash rinse repeat investment in building homes.  I’m thinking this year is shaping up to be a lot more sneaky vibrant than I expected, and to be honest, that’s been true each year for a few years, though last year I wasn’t in a position to take advantage of it.

We’ve gone from Zero to 60 in a few months flat and are eager to get a move on it, as are a lot of our subs and vendors, who have been idling over the winter not at a full stop of course but at less than optimal speed, stressing cash flows with fixed costs and reduced revenues, and especially tricky as you ramp back up.  Our big inflows will probably be 3rd and 4th quarter, and that foresight insight is why I moved some money back into the business - to be safe, to not pay the bank interest more than we have to, and to have some dry powder for some opportunities. 

Costa Rica is always a prominent choice in ex-pat snowbird living, but Panama is actually the real sleeper of value, from what I’ve been reading.

I just discovered about car dealership client waiting rooms what I already know about airplanes - do not arrive without headphones.  Chitchat, beeping and pinging of cell phones, too loud piped in music, an odd TV on somewhere, and the real trigger, someone listening to their phone on speaker phone. 

I’m actually doing an interesting task these days - going through my phone and deleting old contacts - who knows what comes next, adding last names to the 14 Johns, Matts, and Erics that make life harder than it should be.

Free chair if anyone is looking.

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I went to order some swim trunks the other day, and I guess I’m fancy now because a lot of the trunks being offered were nice, and expensive. Like north of $100 expensive, maybe closer to $200.  But with a 3 week sojourn to Sardinia, Corsica and some still undefined places, I thought ‘what the heck?’  So I order a pair or two, and work my through the ordering, shipping info, billing info and then they tally up my total, and for the first time in all my purchasing, there is a ‘tariff’ or in this checkout, a ‘duty charge’ that was like $100 for this order - it was coming from Europe and I guess we put a 35% or so tariff on some goods.  And in an interesting answer to how macro policies impact individual decisions, I cancelled my order before checking out.  Just made the purchase too expensive.

After a cinderella end of season run of Overtime upsets, our local High School got pretty creamed in the sweet 16 of States. The below score wasn't the end of it - Parkland 'exploded' in the 2nd half with nearly perfect long range shooting. Only two good things came of that game - losing saved us from being creamed even worse in the next round, and it brought to an end a fun and exciting season. I don't have anyone on the team, but several of my son's friends play on the team.

I haven’t been following the war too much, other than to see the debate over the dueling narratives in the media and government about whether the news is covering the war results and efforts honestly and accurately.  I can’t say in this particular case, but ever since the cover-up of Biden’s decline and the coverage of Israel’s can-hardly-be-called-a-war effort in Gaza, anything is possible.  The impact on real estate is unknown for sure, and doubly unknown for my little slice of it, since our buyers and the interest in our homes are not tethered to the traditional tides of demand.  Interest rate insensitive to some degree, using reserve cash and not their last dollar to use as a deposit and down payment, purchasing not for relocation but as a discretionary lifestyle choice that very well may be driven by world events and their perception of their safety in the NYC.  We are going to know before too long since I have some houses for sale.

This beauty below will be for sale by the end of the month. Really has everything - 30 acres, 4500 sq ft, 2 story garage, views. We will see what the market thinks of it.

We played around with some wallpaper which was fun.

Many times I wonder if I don’t get a little too excited about things that shouldn’t get my attention, but then typically I wind up thinking that’s not the case.  The amount of whirling complex problems to solve that come my way on a daily basis is staggering. All with associated financial, employee, municipal, regulatory, client aspects interconnected.  Right now, among others of similar stickiness, I’ve nearing the completion of getting service to my two last homes at the Crest - I’ve literally been working on this for 2 years, which is interminable even by Utility standards, which works on its own clock.  To keep your cool and keep to the plan while working through some of these big problems is an art, since a wrong word deed or action can set you back in some cases permanently as half the time these decisions and timelines depend on one person doing something to push it along.  It reminds me why Schindler spent so much money and time flattering and bribing the Germans when setting up his armaments plant in WWII.   Sometimes progress and goals are dependent on a real understanding of what is in your way, and how to remove it successfully.

The house in New Paltz gets great sunlight.

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The warm weather last week got us off to a fast start, and it’s fair to say Catskill Farms is positioned to get some serious work done this year. The office team continues to mature into their roles and the field teams are sufficient and motivated.  We have 2 spec homes for sale nearly finished, 2 client homes just about done. 2 client homes just getting started, 3 spec homes under construction.  We are back to where we used to be - it will be interesting to see where the market is - since even though we are a bit concentrated in one aspect of one industry - building homes for sale - within that sector we are diversified.   Different price points, different styles, different counties.

Birding lookout at the Bashakill just down the street from our offices. Nature is coming alive that's for sure.

One of the downsides of firing on all cylinders is the cash flow needed to to such a thing - and when the company and progress slows down like it did this winter, 2 things happen.  1, your bills become less since you are doing less construction, and 2, your cash flow tightens because you are doing less work.  So when you start to pick up steam, you also stress your cash flow until reaching cruising altitude where the receivables match the payables.  But to say we are pushing the pedal to the metal (not sure if that’s still a saying but back in the day it used to refer to pushing the gas pedal down the whole way to the floor) and we will see what happens.  What used to not be true even in the slightest, is very true now - Time is on my Side.

The Blue Fox outside Narrowsburg NY is a fun place to grab dinner and drinks. It's out of the way locale makes it feel a bit lost in time and place and gives it a real 'shake-off-the-cold and grab a whiskey' feel to it.

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I’m sure everyone is not only sick of the weather, but actually sick of me talking about it in my blog too - and the last few days of ice, melt, ice was no fun at all.

We are inching ahead with our spring plans, ready to burst through the earth like a tulip or other like-minded spring plant.  Within a week it may be soupy wet and muddy, but winter’s restrictions will be in the rear view mirror, even if it would dare to artic blast us again.

It’s pretty amazing how little chance the snow has versus the sun. Bright rays and some mid-30’s and you can literally watch the snow disappear.

I’ve been waiting for 2 years for electric to one of my homes.  Two years is a bit of an exaggeration because that’s when I first applied for electric when we started the house, but 2+ years it has been, and now almost a year with a finished home just waiting on electric.  It’s the type of thing you are happy didn’t happen earlier in my career when holding onto a house for the fun of it wouldn’t really fly too long.

Or, maybe the timing would have advantageous like if I was trying to get it up and sold in 2020, then Covid happened, then by the time I had electric house prices doubled but the increased cost of construction didn’t matter since the house was built prior - A guy can dream.

This year my goal is to fully price my homes.  Meaning not sell too quick, or early in the marketing campaign.  It’s hard to argue with the success of our sales strategy - take good offers everytime, but it’s also hard to argue I’ve left a lot of money on the table by doing so, specifically thinking about at the beginning of 2025, when I had my last two houses in Olivebridge to sell.  I was worried about the market, so was (and still am) happy to have sold them, but it was a strong year for real estate in Ulster county so I probably walked away $200k lighter than I could have.

And since I’m picking up this long-awaited post after writing the above paragraphs, we are having a nice spring week with temps touching 70 and dry.  I’m running around from job to job to make sure all is moving forward in as straight of a line as possible.  Played pickleball on the home court yesterday, first match of the season.  Heard some geese coming home high in the sky last night.  Watched the water melt and run from all directions.

I have a 3 week trip to Sardinia, Corsica and points still undetermined coming up in May.

Pictures of the Ranch home in New Paltz we just are finishing up.