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

NYC is much in the news these days with the Knicks seemingly set to win the NBA crown.  You have to be careful anytime you assert ‘something is in the news’ because it’s possible it’s just in your news, your feed, reinforced and self-perpetuating with each like, follow, linger or forward of any given post. 

As least in my curated algorithm, the Knicks, the games, and the streets of NYC including watch-parties and street corner gatherings have garnered a certain momentum of celebration.  I’m a big NYC appreciator - lived there, fish there for most of my business clients, still read Crain's Business Journal for the micro-business take on the city, do the Five Boro bike tour whenever I can and read the New Yorker since I was 20, which while this publication covers a variety of international and national issues, at its core is a tribal coverage of the five boros. 

Mamdani continues to impress - policy success in real life and real time still to be determined - but as for a coherent vision of what he sees as important for NY, and building coalitions around that goal, he seems to be on the right track.  His infectious smile hurts my face just looking at it.   He eschewed a front-row ticket to the Knicks game, though you can bet it was available to him with all the celebs showcasing their status and access.  Instead he picks a fight with the Knicks owner and watches the game from a small LGBTQ bar.  He’s got a good feel for the micro-political theater, which is an interesting skill in one of the world’s largest cities.  

Glad I checked my facts before posting - seems Mamdani did attend game 3 but with nose bleed seats. The NYPost seems to think this is a betrayal of his 'everyman' act, since even the nose-bleed seats are tough to get and are expensive. But, not to me - since I'm sure he could have gotten court side, could have gotten opening ceremonies, and could be putting himself front and center in the whole spectacle. (remember, this is just my world-view, wholly determined by what's being fed me in my social media). That's a more typical approach and tactic of a NY politician.

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Taylor Swift on the other hand, she just can’t see someone else’s parade and not want to be the Queen of it.  I remember thinking the same thing when Olivia Rodrigo was singing Vampire at one of the award shows and Swift stole some thunder by standing, and dancing with prominence, knowing full-well where the cameras would swing.  She did it with Karol G, but less so.  And now with the Knicks - seeing all the attention hoisted on the celebs she’s like “I need to be there” and so she was, getting a lot of attention for a sport and city that as far as I know holds no particular interest for her. Her over-the-top fandom wherever she is grates on my sense of propriety.  Think about - worth billions, universally lauded, applauded and even worshipped around the world and still needs not to miss out on a moment of international fame and attention.  Trump-like. Her constant energy is exhausting. Humans - we are a weird bunch.

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You're so much fun to be around

You had to have a white hot spotlight

You had to be a big shot last night

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Dua Lipa got married, and that was a bit of a disappointment to see my chance for that relationship extinguished with finality. That guy of hers most be some kind of lover since her energies and demands would seem to be inexhaustible. My employee from a few years ago put together this bar car for me and included a framed photo of my girl Dua.

I was concerned about Ariana Grande's physical appearance so I killed some time googling her and surprise, I wasn't the only one. But then I opened up my unrelated TikTok app just a few minutes later and low and behold the very first thing in my feed is a threat about Grande and her appearance. We used to think the idea that our phone is listening and recording was coincidental and eye-brow raising - now it's clear it's happening real time all the time. Every conversation, All the time. Catalogued and archived. Marketed to and surviellenced from.

My Tik Tok feeds is giving me a lot of raucous loud boisterous New Yorkers being New Yorkers. Fun to watch.  A bit dangerous this brew of excitement and mix of all the classes of NYC.  

It’s been a wild 9 months of planning and a wilder 3 months of construction execution.  We are literally firing on all cylinders across the whole company - the team is in place and doing just fine.

It’s hard to describe the power of a team in this business.  There are several rungs or circles - you have your employees; you have your subcontractors that while may run their own businesses act for the most part like employees just by the amount of business we throw off their way in terms of coordination and orchestration and communication; you have larger subs where we comprise a measurable but not absolute piece of their business; and you have the vendors and subs where we occupy the standard ‘just a valued client’ position.

We spend upwards of $250,000 a week on goods and services, and there are few if any of those goods and services which don’t require a fair degree of effort on our part to get the job done.  Few things in my world are on auto-pilot.  Too many moving pieces, too much human failability and fragility, too much interaction of people, parts and circumstance - an interplay of Murphy’s Law and what could happen will happen.  It’s not easy; it’s actually downright hard. And 25 years into it, with over 300 homes up and running well, I’m under no illusion as to the price it takes to do my job well and extend the positive legacy of Catskill Farms.

The ‘price’ is measured in many ways.  The cost of the effort - the cost of supervising and tweaking or improving the effort - the cost in time - the personal cost in mental health.  It’s a grown up job with grown up responsibilities and grown up consequences.  The price a person pays for small business survival is a price most people can’t fathom in the slightest.  We entrepreneurs are aliens to the rest of you.

Part of that is because I push.  I push everyday. None of our job sites sit around.  We just finished a 5000 sq ft home 2000 ft off any other road with a complicated utility project, complicated access and a horrid winter.  And we did it in less than a year.  We did it without power to the site.  We did it with day to day site access management.  We did it with hard to communicate directions to the job.  And that was by no means the only thing we had going on.   Some of our clients, for whatever reason, get the immensity of the effort.  Others don’t.  In the end, our efforts seem to get rewarded with our longevity.   I look around at all the players who have come and yes, gone, and there are few examples of those who stick around.  There’s Western Sullivan Properties, but they just copied us with little in the way of shame for doing so - they are putting out some nice houses and seem to be here to stay, but other than that, the number of companies that scaled and stuck around is nearly zero in terms of building new homes for the sales market. 

The “Our Homes, Your Land” idea of 2022 remains just another stroke of my market insight abilities that have powered this company since the first contrarian market thoughts I had in 2002.  My contrarian streak has served me and a lot of other people well in business throughout this journey - 2002, build new when the fad was farmhouse fixer-upper; 2005, build 2 bedroom cottages when everyone else was going big and bigger; 2009, keep building in the face of an international real estate collapse; 2020, put all the chips on the table with land purchases before it was clear that Covid would propel the Catskills like it did.   There’s been a lot more contrarian bets and decisions, and while it’s easy to see the big pronounced ones, the day to day ones - the conversation, pivot, insight, hire, purchase, investment, approach - those are woven into the fabric of each day. I think differently. And that works sometimes, infuriates others, bemuses others and evokes pity from others.  It’s a mixed bag for sure; I’m well aware of it. But it is the secret sauce.

I’m also very well-aware I’ve been using a ton of semi-colons here, which gives me a weird sense of accomplishment because I’m using them correctly. If I can weave in a colon, then I’m really in business.

So the ‘Our homes your land’ concept came from the insight that some, quite a few actually, families who couldn’t find the house they wanted from 2021-2023, bought land thinking it was the easier route, or a viable route.   Then they found out it was hard: hard to get started, hard to get engineered, hard to find a design, hard to get a permit and then even harder to have a successful build.  So they were sitting on land, sitting on land that was then unavailable to me, increasing the scarcity and thus raising the cost of land in general.  So I marketed our ready to go homes, our plug and play homes you can personalize but don’t need to reinvent, our homes that we know how to build and price, our homes that we have worked out the issues.  In sum, our homes that can get you moving forward quickly and affordably and professionally and predictably.

So we are building a lot - 

In Catskill.

In Saugerties.

Another in Saugerties.

In Bethel.

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In Kerhonkson.

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In Callicoon.

In Narrowsburg.

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In Barryville.

In Cochecton.

Each with their own building departments, full-time, part-time, never-time. With their own inspection criteria and priorities and processes.

Lots of personal adventures including a big graduation party at our house for my son's friends who are graduating (he's just ending his jr year but his friend group is heavily weighted to seniors). Really fun and quite large party, that ended by me discovering a puncture in the pool and the water drained 85% of the way and few snakes crawling around in the pool. We went big, with tower lights for the pickleball courts, lots of food, even a beer pong hat (without the beer) apparatus.

Go Big or Go Home.

Reposting, since I mercifully took it down 2 years ago, but now I'm mildly agitated again.

(Update - Google recognized this post over night and is now 3rd on Jared Covit's internet profile - also, important to note you should search in 'incognito mode', otherwise your search results are biased by previous searches.)

Before I get started with the matter at hand, I do have to say I watched a movie last night at the Roxy Hotel, NYC named Sasquatch Sunset that ranked right up there with Swiss Army Man for weirdness which lured you in with a cast you knew from other hits. And when I say weird, I mean just out there and thoroughly unexpected. I recommend both.

Nothing gets under my craw ('hunters centuries ago noticed that some birds swallowed bits of stone that were too large to pass through the craw and into the digestive tract. These stones, unlike the sand and pebbles needed by birds to help grind food in the pouch, literally stuck in the craw, couldn't go down any farther') more than disrespect for the efforts we make to provide good looking and value oriented shelter and accommodation for the past 25 years. But while it may get stuck in my craw, for the most part the gag reflex recovers with some mutual reflection and we all go on with our lives, sometimes repentant, often just turning the page to other more valuable affairs.

However, on occasion, but not many occasions for the amount of contracts I engage - large and small, verbal and written - they digress into the messy process of litigation, and then we all waste a lot of time and money trying to prove this or that.

In 2021 and 2022, we built a house for Jared Covit at 174 Rivka Road, Saugerties NY. It is a premium piece of land with a wonderful meandering stream defining its border. The home we built and personalized wall by wall by Jared Covit and company sold in the $600's and now is probably worth $950k or over a million in the right hands.

So what do you do if you are Jared Covit, and your upstate building partner - who built your dream home in the middle of a world-wide pandemic pretty much on time and on budget with supply-chain challenges never seen before - ? You sue him/them for breach of contract, attempt to pierce the corporate veil and harm him personally, accuse him of unjust enrichment, breach of implied warranty, and deceptive acts, and all attorney fees to boot. More or less, you go for the jugular of someone made you $300k-$500k in 24 months - an ROI even Warren Buffett would approve of and probably other than a lucky chance in a high tech start up, the best return he will see in his life.

All but the 'warranty' claim was deemed improper (I would personally would call it harassing, insulting and offensive to the team) and dismissed by an Ulster County court. The assertion - the siding could have been installed in a different fashion. I would argue, as could be asserted of every item in the house.

I'm not a big fan of the 'litigation privilege' concept - I mean I totally get why what you say and plead in court cannot be used in a defamation suit, since you can easily see dozens of defamation lawsuits birthed from every legal action. But, that leaves us businesspeople, in an internet era of google search results, in the precarious position of having our names smeared with the headlines, and the initial cause of action, but the not ultimate resolution. Right now Jared Covit's search results are a mix of professional and this lawsuit he filed, but now this rebuttal will also appear along his search, and it will have professional repercussions, as the Violent Femmes sang in the 80's with their hit Kiss Off, "this will now go down on your permanent record."

Google search loves my blog since it satisfies a lot of what google search demands - 1, it's been around forever. 2, it is constantly maintained and updated. 3, it is relevant. 4, a lot of people read it (but like porn, won't admit it!!). So, if I mention you, and you don't have a lot of entries about yourself online, you better believe my post will start to show up. Quickly. Prominently. It helps when someone has an unusual name like Covit. 'Petersheim's' a great example of a unique name, but I have so much written about me over the last twenty years that to penetrate my google search it needs to be a pretty big event that gets covered by the news and then picked up by other outlets. That at least for awhile would gain some traction. You can always post to online review platforms but people take those with a grain of salt, or actually a sea of salt.

I think it's fair. Tit for tat. The only reason I can think of that Jared Covit would accuse me personally of the nastiness he did was to harass and pressure us to resolve the issue, to make us look bad, to affirm his compulsions. He started an Instagram account solely dedicated to throwing shade at me, and then targeted my followers with invites to this seemingly innocuous page that then got dark once you entered. He stopped when it was clear he was going to get sued, and probably have gigantic personal exposure for he and his wife.

One could legitimately ask if this was and is good for business, and, my answer is that it's hard to know for sure, but I think over the years, people like it when I stick my finger in someone's eye - that they would like to do it themselves but can't. And at this point, what's good for business isn't that paramount for me - I'm about retired (not true, but aspirationally it's fun to say). Who would have known that 'aspirationally' wasn't a word? (at least according the squiggly line under it).

In our response and request that the Court dismiss this frivolous and harassing cause of action by Jared Covit- attempting to pierce the corporate shield and hold me personally liable for actions of the corporation my attorney wrote:

"Plaintiffs veil piercing-claim must be dismissed pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(1) for failing to state a claim because (i) Plaintiffs only recite conclusory allegations of the veil-piercing factors and, also, (ii) failto allege any fraud or wrongdoing beyond purported contractual breaches."

And in doing just that - In dismissing the cause of action attempting to pierce the corporate veil and envelop me personally in this lawsuit (ie, harassment), the Court, in a brief almost dismissive response, seemingly agrees completely with our response and writes -

"Upon review, it is apparent that the portion of the Plaintiffs' second cause of action seeking to pierce the corporate veil cannot survive the Defendants' motion to dismiss.  Even recognizing the liberal manner by which the sufficiency of a pleading is to be adjudged in determining a CPLR 3211 (a) (7) motion, it nevertheless remains that the Plaintiffs' complaint is insufficient as ... is totally devoid of solid, nonconclusory allegations,..."

I love the 'totally devoid of solid, nonconclusory allegations'. Lawyers aren't supposed to file lawsuits they now to be frivolous, but in the cases of insider baseball, few are held accountable for wasting the courts time.

The problem with filing a lawsuit with 4 or more suspect (and I'm only using such a moderate phrase since I'm feeling generous) causes of action is that I will blog about each and everyone separately, thus accentuating my impact on Jared Covit's internet profile.

Stay tuned as we measure the speed as which Google recognizes my relevant blog post about Jared Covit and Lauren Rich.

My son proving his metal as the JV starting QB on a lovely Saturday afternoon.

And the garden is producing a steady stream of peppers and tomatoes.

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