Told Ya So (Chapin Estate Raises Prices on Cottages)

By all the mimicking, mirroring, copying, imitating, stealing, borrowing and all the other words out there to describe the flattery of being followed in our design and business approach - I must have colored myself a lot less original and smart than other people color me - but that's the advantage of coming from Lancaster PA, a modest place of unassuming hardworking God fearing folks.

Here's the post from 15 months ago, reflecting on the impossibility of Chapin Estate offering Cottages for $275k.  What I said then was 1.), it is impossible to build and sell a nice 1500 sq ft home for $275k, and 2.), underestimating your clients intelligence and coming up with 100 reasons why, well, actually, it's not really $275k but $350k does not work in this buyer's market and is a great way to lose a sale.

Well, according to the Sullivan County Democrat, Chapin is now offering 1500 sq ft Cottages for $375k.  So my point was obviously well-heeded, and the truth of the assertion remains - honest dealing rules the day and don't underestimate (insult) the intelligence of your buyer.  It's a hard lesson for these slick salesmen, but eventually the reality of depressed sales levels forces a 'come to Momma' moment, when ego is forced to bow and concede the race to the reality of business survival.

So you take a builder of multi-million dollar log cabin homes with scarcely a sale over the last few years and evolve into a proud builder of cottages.

I love small homes.  We build them cause we love them.  We have been enterprising, nationally-recoginized, lovers of small homes.  I wonder if they can say the same thing.  I wonder what it will like to be a 2nd class citizen in this Sotheby's Development.  I just can't imagine many of my clients, who are quite established, and successful wanting to be 2nd class to anyone, especially to the Gold Coast of Jersey.

And one more thing - my neighbor Bryan was making some snarky comment about my grammar in my posts, and a lot of "too"s are "to"s, 'thens' are 'thans' , spellings that the checker doesn't catch and a lot of other simple grammatical errors.  let my point out that I am aware of this, I'm not some grammar neanderthal, in fact I take great pride in my knowledge of the rules and usages.  However, I'm busy, yet still come up with the time to blog creatively, and rarely do I reread while writing - it's a stream of conscious thing, which I think adds to the blogs value.  And when I do reread it's typically on my phone, while waiting for something else, with no easy ability to edit.  it's a rule of mine to not rewrite a post after it's been posted for the simple reason that would probably increase the likelihood of retracting or rewriting the previous night's thoughts - believe me, there's been plenty of post I'd of liked to take down.

But thats the whole idea - to capture a moment of my mind's wandering in terms of the nexus of my business building, my challenges, and life that gets woven through this all-consuming upstate design and build journey.  To rewrite it to (ha ha, just a joke - TOO) carefully would turn it into the perfectly polished pitches we are bombarded with daily -

And seriously  - who really needs another perfectly polished pitch?  It's so lame and so yesterday.

Or, as Fergie would say - 'that's so 2008, and you're so 2 thousand and late'.