Sold - Farm 61 in Olivebridge NY

 We had the honor and pleasure of selling on of our new farmhouses today, a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath marvel, with a finished well-lit basement that added another 600 sq ft, and a bathroom.

The home sits on 4+ acres, and has plenty of porch and deck to enjoy.  We started this home as a spec home, meaning without a prearranged buyer - a type of 'if we build it, they will come' sort of thing.  Come they did, and the young couple who purchased it should be pretty comfy in their snazzy little home in Ulster County NY.  I mean, these homes are really neat, and you don't have to take my word for it since one could say I'm biased - the marketplace over and over says it when they come back onto the market - they sell quick, they sell for good money.  Over and over.  The amount of money - realtors, homeowners, contractors, pool guys, gardeners, landscapers, tax collectors - is really unfathomable in its immenseness.  

I think my friend Rob in one of my cottages call it the 'economic cross-multiplier' - which I'm sure is a common term for all you hoyti toyti business school grads (or actually grads that learned much in college) - but to me, it was a new phrase that encapsulated what I knew for a fact - that day to day, year to year, decade to decade - that the impact on the economic vibrancy of these towns we work in is, frankly, gigantic.

Congrats to the new owners.  Welcome to the 'hood.  Sold for the mid $500's, all in, including land, permitting, house construction and basement buildout.

2020 Election

 Wow, that was quite the October in terms of political chaos, unexpected twists and turns (Philly shooting, protests, and looting, Pres gets covid, Pres does 18 events in 4 days), but we seem to be on the back side of it, regardless of the tactics of some of the politicians and their media mouthpieces on the right assert.

Took my son and a friend to Philly to see what democracy looks like.

I'm in a position where each and every day I interact with persons across the political spectrum, and what is interesting is I read a stat a week or two ago that claimed that 70%+ of people do not interact or even know someone who is not in their political silo.  I don't believe everything I read, and polls are under great scrutiny, but even if it was half that, I would still see it as an astonishing data piece and explains a lot.

I go out of my way to get information from a wide range of sources - magazines, newspapers, news, radio, random apps like tik tok and instagram.  Too much information lately, where by the time election rolled around my phone reported a daily use of screen time of 8+ hrs!!!!  I don't really know how they measure that - is listening to a podcast screen time?  Or a newscast, or call in radio show?  I hope so, though I admit I have a newbie energy level for tik tok - guiltfree too, since I think it's really fun, and lack of guilt makes it all the more dangerous.  Keep an eye out for my tik tok shuffle I'm working on.

As a builder, in the niche I occupy, I interact with a wide range of persons, as I said above.  I sell homes in upstate (rural and red) to the coastal elite (families from NYC and mostly blue), I work everyday with a range of subcontractors and employees (red) and I also work with surveyors, engineers, lawyers, accountants who are educated, many times male and a tad older and harder to pigeon hole into a political generalization (purple).

It's a fascinating vantage point - with a ton of information and preferences and actions coming from all sides.  What is true today, if you turn off the news, most people I'm interacting with have moved on, accepted the results, and are now in the process of putting politics back where it always was - white noise in the background, instead of a daily test of how loud can you support your candidate.

Late last week, as the counts were drip drip dripping in, and cable news was doing a great job of narrating the drama when nothing much was happening, I attempted to go news free for a day.  When that didn't happen, I tried for a couple of hours.  When that didn't happen, I tried for an hour.  Waking up in the middle of the night, refreshing my phone, praying for a non-trump headline.  Back in 2016, I went to sleep only to wake up, check the results, and was as shocked as the next guy, and not in a good way.  Anyways, I finally on Monday started to create some distance between me and the news, and now I'm trying to check in at the end of the day for the Arizona counts, and other stuff.  Nothing much changes hour to hour, so for me at least, checking in less is better, and actually just as informative.   Not easy though.  Everyone has their TV on to the news.

You have to wonder how long Arizona is going to be at 98% counted?  They've been stuck there for a week, and you have really get a kick out of Fox News' premature call of that state, since now it is down to 14,000 votes.  What a stake through the heart of Trump's election night momentum.

It's like the Trump Show is truly afraid of what comes next for it.  How can you make an argument with a straight face of stopping the count in Georgia and PA, continuing to count in Arizona, claiming that the tight races they are losing are fraudulent but not a word about the close races they won, no introspection into last election, just as tight, with voting done with the same rules, but turned in their favor?

You can make the argument because you know your support is wide, and 2 subsets of that support are the following - people with something political at stake, and non-college educated voters, many of whom are drowning in their chosen sources of information, echoing and repeating a small and selected slice of the day's news.

And let's admit it - education matters.  Education gives you empathy, perspective, hope, a baseline of comparing today with other days/times.  

Also, from what I saw, Trump turned out the vote.  I don't have the data, but I wouldn't be highly surprised if first time voters and 'low propensity' voter counts were large and unprecendented.  Trump motivated people to vote who don't regularly participate in the political process.  I think the trouble there, however, is these people won't continue to vote, won't be regular voters, and will go back to not participating.  Their enthusiasm for Trump is not easily transferable to just any state or national candidate.  In fact, just the opposite.

Got A Drone

Some of the best shots of real estate is from the air, so the the new drone has been a fun addition to my marketing bag of tricks.  Pretty simple to operate, with lots of safety features if you don't get the cheapest one, like collision avoidance, a 'home' button that brings it back home when you push the limits, range et... too far, and a bunch of other stuff.  Should also help get better perspective on land and such as I'm buying it.

Bought it right in time for the peak foilage season up here the Catskills.  The thing about the 'peak', is you get several false peaks, thinking it can't get better than this, but it does, and then there is that one day, or collection of days, where it really is the peak, and then it quickly fades into the avalanche of falling leaves, and then bare trees before you know it.

My first trial run, besides at my house in Milford PA, was up at our project in Kerhonkson NY we just built out. It was 4 homes, sold quick, and the families are loving them now that the world has changed.

Here's a pic of the famous hotel in Milford named the Fauchere.

This is a shot of a farmhouse, looking east towards the Gunks and New Paltz.

A Ranch.

Shot of a barn going up in Cochecton, NY.

The Delaware River.

Another Ranch in Kerhonkson.

And my All-Star Team of cross-disciplinarians.  When you stay as busy as we stay, it's a constant crush of real responsibility across everyone's desktop.  


 

All the problems of yesterday are receding, 4 months into solving them.  I can tell by my need to write about them, a process I have always found to help me untangle the issue, and identify ways forward.   Now I'm left to solve the 100 regular problems that arise each day.  The bottom-line solution is always the same - dig in, sacrifice everything else, work hard and harder, and solve one layer of the issue at the same - the ol' 'a journey starts with a single step'.  The sacrifice is always real - in this case, waking before 4am, not coaching, keeping my son out of travel leagues, having little energy left over for life other than work.  Each morning I wake now, I slowly can see the extreme nature of the last 4 months, with business doubling, and black swan issues diving from the sky out of nowhere.

Of course, there is another way to - make excuses, fall behind, disappoint vendors/bankers/clients alike, sidetrack your business and lose the momentum which is extremely hard to recapture.  We have been on a forward momentum train for 20 years - some times slower than others, but always moving forward.  It's way too dangerous for survival to be sitting in one place.

New Homes for Sale In Saugerties

 This weekend we are opening the gates again to new clients, which we stopped doing for a while just to ensure an orderly onboarding of a pretty heavy queue of new clients in late spring and early summer.   One of the advantages of being in business a while, is you can accurately gauge your capacity, and not wear rose-colored glasses in what you can realistically produce.  In fact, with the subcontractor and product supply chain stretched thin, you can expect to produce less, or at least have more trouble and hurdles producing the same, and real trouble producing more.

I remember when I started in businesses in 2002, it was just beginning to be the boom times that ultimately lead to the housing crash of 2007/08.  It was tough to assemble a team because everyone was busy, so you had to use the C team (if you are lucky) (and deal with all those scheduling and quality issues inherent in C team product) and pay A team prices.  It's frankly easier to start a business in a recession where employment isn't full and vendors have capacity and interest in new clients.

Kacy, my right arm marketing machine, developed a marketing brochure for my weekend land and house pairings/showings.  Turned out good.

Our new website has been passing all of our content uploading tests with flying colors, and proved adaptable to most every request and tweak we come up with, so that's a real victory.

https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/for-sale

Amazing moon this morning at 6am.  It was one of those mornings that had a bit of everything - crispness in the air, leaves beginning to turn, sun only faintly stirring, and a gigantic big full moon straight-ahead - 

Catskill Farms Launches its New Website

 It's hard to quantify the degree to which our website deletion by the morons at Applied Innovations led by Jess Coburn disrupted our business, but 8 weeks later, we finished the heavy lift on a vision and execution of our new website, that can be seen here at www.thecatskillfarms.com.  It turned out great, on many levels, and the idea that it was going to turn out great was by no means assured or guaranteed for a host of reasons.

Nonetheless, it was a huge distraction, and energy suck.  My one colleague has not really worked on anything else for 8 weeks, uploading content, and that effort has been augmented by my own daily macro guidance and micro troubleshooting, and on occasion the other 3 people in the office would pitch in, like last Thursday, where we all pitched in.

Of course, for each minute spent on this, there is an opportunity cost of not spending it on something else, be it a client, a sale, a hire, a problem, a solution, an idea.

What made this even more challenging is the fact we were wholly unprepared for it, and a creative exercise like this is typically layered with a lot of brainstorming, branding conversation, directional ideas, visioning, evaluation of what works and what doesn't on the old site, as well as a process for interviewing and hiring a company to handle said task.

As anyone who knows the digital space at all, there are all types of solutions out there - solutions with their own language, their own terminology, pluses, minuses, drawbacks.

I'm an old hand at hiring, which mostly means I know I'm only going to get it right about 30% of the time.  With office employees, it's a real disruption when I get it wrong, since it's a small office and the investment in anyone new is pretty large, and the weirdness of having someone in our space is always tough on the culture.  With carpenters, I typically just say 'show up, and let's see what you know'.  With subcontractors, even if you hire right, there is bound to be miscommunication with anyone new because we have a lot going on and judgement calls are made daily, some right some wrong.

The risk on a exercise like this one - reinventing a space 10,000 people a month visit, a space that defines who you are, a space that is expensive to create - is fraught with challenges, and I'm happy to report we nailed with not just with the vision but with the hire we selected, Steve, from outside London, who we found on upwork.com, a site a client of mine recommended.

How did we select Steve from outside London with live in girlfriend and baby?  We put out a query on upwork, and I used my finely tuned ear to find a good match.  My colleague Kacy steered me away from some bigger firms who would've wanted to offer more than we needed.

We were trying to update our website, without losing the feel of the site, which is a lot like the feel of our homes - comfy, working, fun, cool, thoughtful, not too fancy, not too showy.  It's an improvement on what we had, my old partner of 20 years, a website that was added onto, patched up, greased up, so often it was like a pair of jeans, or boots, or anything else well-loved, and hard worked.

There's a lot more to this story, from a business vantage, that I hope to get to soon.

Can't make it up....

The amount of baloney I save my clients from is pretty significant.  They really have no idea the brain damage I take on their behalf, protect them from phony contractors, misguided utility advice, long way around simple problems.  After I dropped Caroline Akt from my brokerage, I had to finish up like 8 of her deals, and I'm always amazed at how easy repping real estate is compared to what we do.  I mean, what we do is tough, and half the time clients are upset at a crooked outlet, and other times I broker a simple piece of real estate (as opposed to what we do at Catskill Farms, which is find land, buy it, develop it, design it, drill wells, clear land, pair it with an owner, get it financed, etc... - it's hard), and I'll go broker a simple piece of real estate and people think I'm a hero.  It's just two different universes, in terms of complexity and difficulty, and client expectations.

Here's what greeted me at my small project in Saugerties NY - now mind you, I did what no builder has ever done before, which was write a letter to all 30 homeowners along this street we are building warning them about construction traffic and to be a little more careful with my personal cell phone, and I also posted these signs to keep reminding my team to keep it slow.  So someone scratched in some alt words and now it reads 'Report Chuck, Crimes against Nature".

SERIOUSLY!  7am.  I'm still laughing at the absurdity of it, since whoever wrote clearly owns a home, has cleared trees, etc...  I mean, I've been slapped around enough over the last month, that this was a bit of levity.

And then this - I'm trying to hire a project super for some work in Sullivan County, so this guy responds and I decide to meet him at a project and I can't get a word in edgewise, then he starts talking covid and fake stats, etc... and I say what I think is pretty nicely, "I'm not really interested in talking about that'. and he starts going off about this and that and says "I knew when you wouldn't shake me hand..." storms out of the building, blares out my driveway with a bunch of 'fucks' and 'you' and horn honks, etc... and completes it with this text

"I will blast u in the internet  you asshole, like I already heard 

Fuck u"

Like I said, I protect my clients from a lot of this insanity.  But it's what I navigate to get stuff done.  For nearly 20 years.

Here's a farmhouse in Narrowsburg - in contract.

Mini-barn in Narrowsburg, under contract.

Converted and retrofitted 1931 Community Hall in Phoenixville PA, into a single family residence.

Barn something or another in Saugerties NY, under contract. 

Lot clearing in Saugerties.  Don't ask, Under Contract.

Ranch house in Saugerties, Under Contract.

Ranch in Kerhonkson.  Under Contract.

Lil' Farm in Olivebridge NY.  Contract, under.

Me modeling a rain jacket I borrowed from my electrician and failed to give back and now it was raining so I sent a pic to rub it in just for fun.  I love my Vineyard Vines shorts with a bulldog surfing.  I actually wear them too much.

Dredging a pond and prepping for a house build.  Under contract.

Ranch in Kerhonkson. Under contract.

Farmhouse in Saugerties.  Under contract.

Barn in Kerhonkson, Under Contract.

  

Actually, maybe the guy has a point.  I am a nature menace.   But really, aren't we all?

A very hard day.

Greatest Hits Video

Catskill Farms Youtube

Just a quick reminder - Our main website was lost on Thursday.  Gone into the ether world of non-retrievability due to an unheard of human failing at our server company, which deleted my life's work with a click of a button.  Let me add a quick insult to injury - when we went to redirect the url to a different location, we didn't have the security pin number (we had the password and ID), so they wouldn't let us do it, and we now thus far spent 45 hours on the phone with GoDaddy online chat trying to resolve, so when the AP article that just came out and the NYTimes article that will come out on Sunday searches of me and my company don't reach a broken link.  Seriously stressful.

It wasn't the fanciest website.  It was without debate out of date.  But it functioned well, had a ton of content, and in a way, really represented us in a true fashion.  Not too fancy, not perfect, not entirely convinced of our own authenticity, not over-branded, not too slick.  Violated some basis website rules like too much narrative, undersized script.  It got 10,000 visitors a month, month after month, year after year.  Hundreds of thousands of page views.  It was a tank.  It never went down.

It had a pic of my son when he was 6 months old; he is now nearly 12 (I love the semi-colon use when possible).   The brand, logo, color, fonts haven't really changed since 2001 when I first created it.  Of all the things that have changed in my life, it's fascinating that the look and the feel of the company that I created when the company was more an idea than a reality had been right on.  The concept, the original idea remains unchanged.

The website was familiar.  A millennial client a few weeks ago gave me the compliment, "I love how out of date your website it!.  Its retro".  Now, in a testament to my growth as a person, I did still sell them a house.  And it was 'out of date', but it functioned fine, and was a tool that hundreds of thousands of people and families have used to not only get a flavor of what we do, but a flavor of the Catskills.

And not some perfect filtered instagramed version of makers, and farmers and chair makers and morning dew off the grass - that's for other people's make believe version of the New Catskills.   Us, we remained linked to the soil, the Catskills unbranded, a getaway, familiar, approachable.  Affordable.

So I mourn, though the efforts of recovery that were undertaken over the last 40 hours has been remarkable and bring me to my point of this post.

In the building industry especially, as I'm sure is true in most creative/service/production industries, most clients are awesome, thankful, respectful.  But there's always that one a year that is just awful, unthankful, unrepentant.  And those suck.  My favorite example was two guys we built a house for, found land for, designed a house for, then built it quickly, even though the whole area was hit by a windstorm that knocked out power for 5 weeks - meaning people working on their home had no electric when they went home, couldn't shower, couldn't refrigerate their food, couldn't turn on a light, get water, etc...  These guys were so awful, so mean, so publically intent on soiling us as they floated in their swimming pool and broadcast cooking shows and entertained wildly from the house that 'was so bad', that I had to come up with a coping mechanism.   Spending 8 months bringing someone's dream to life, only to be rejected in the end, is not a small issue for a professional who takes pride in what they do - that end of the job relief in a 'job well-done' is replaced with tired anxiety.

Anyone who achieves has been there.  At the moment you think you get respite, you don't, and you have find the reserves you thought you would get from a job well-done, you have to get it from somewhere else, typically from within.

I mean, I was hurt by it, but I felt awful for my team, my designers, my cleaners, painters, carpenters and others.  Out of a need for a mental health tool, it occurred to me what might be a surprisingly more effective tool of response was to try and keep it at arm's length.  So, a failproof tool I know use in these situations is to pivot and find someone who has done something great for me, and show them the gratitude that was missing from the other experience.

And truth be told, while I suffer great ups and downs as I keep my company small while it grows large, there are heroics performed on my behalf every day, every hour actually.  We have teams of people, father and son teams, subcontractors, employees, families, homeowners - to find the glory and the gratitude in this mix of activity is not hard.  It may be hard to get out of the weeds and stick your head up while you are solving these problems, but if you do, you get to see glory in the effort, glory in the creative problem solving, glory in the 'they got my back' mantra of those I surround myself with.

As I get better at solving problems - and I don't mean the actual remedy or solution since I've been successfully solving hard problems from day one in this line of work I selected -  I more mean the process and attitude I employ as I solve them, the ability to succeed as a team, to motivate effectively, to lead constructively, to accept 'business is problem-solving at its core', to relish the opportunity to work daily with a talented team of individuals who come from incredibly diverse backgrounds - from PHDs to garbage men - to respect their contribution equally, honestly, to show them gratitude with friendship and respect, when you get right down to it, I'm a lucky guy indeed.

Even if website is gone forever.  And it doesn't change the fact I sold my Tesla stock last year at what is now a 52 week low of $235 per share (I think the last marker was $1600).