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

After a year of planning board meetings and requirements, after spending more than $150,000 in engineering, legal and surveying fees, I received in May the final approval of 9 building lots in one of the most sought-after areas perhaps in the country.

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I liked the Town of Olive Planning Board. I think they overdid some things that had little benefit to anyone, from an engineering perspective, but overall, a true cross-section of the community, with a fairness commitment to both the applicant and the community.

This low inventory environment is so because of all the NYC’ers who never found a home during Covid when demand spiked, compounded by the true lack of inventory, and the idea that no one who still wants to live upstate wants to trade houses because for the most part a lot of families are locked in at low interest rates.  7% instead of 3% is real money.  There’s a $1000 a month difference between a 3% loan and a 7% loan on a $600k house with $120k down (loan of $480K).

But at the same time, $1000 a month isn’t really the problem for new sales - the problem is inventory, priced sanely.  And that’s what we intend to supply.  I’m sure it will be a hit. The bank appraisals for my financing for each home have eye-poppingly elevated - elevated isn't the right word since it infers 'artificial' - but just what the market will bear.

I’m reading Hammer of the Gods, a 70’s book about Led Zeppelin.  I read it before, way back, but I needed something easy to read since I was having trouble with reading books and making progress, which is something that doesn’t make me happy since I’ve always been a reader.  One thing that stuck out to me was the fact that the main-stream music press ignored, disdained, underplayed the size of the impact, the crowds, and the achievements of Led Zeppelin.  Just didn’t write about them, or panned their music, or just gave them less due then was due considering they were outselling the Rolling Stones and blew the Beatles off the charts.  Part of the reason is they didn’t court the press, they didn’t cowtow, kiss ass, etc…  They were bad boys who played loud music and were a bit of heathens with the women.  

Catskill Farms, or actually me, I’m a bit the same way (sans the heathen with women part).  Whether it be Escape Brooklyn, or NYT’s, or a dozen leading pubs, we get ignored.  Why, because we are quantifiably the best selling outfit around, and have done it outside the traditional confines of how that is typically done.  Escape Brooklyn, which is literally a magazine directly targeting our audiences, won’t let us advertise in their publications even though we have best in class stuff.

Ashokan Acres -

Used to bug me, not that long ago really, but it turns out a saying I read not that long ago makes sense - in fact, 2 of them resonate with me.

'You never find haters that are doing better than you.'

And

'I light my way by the bridges I burn.'

It’s just my way, and I guess Ill come into this world and go out of it without really changing too much.

Or as Waylon Jennings liked to sing - ‘being crazy kept me from going insane.’

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Catskill Farms has been developing building sites, designing homes, building homes, and selling homes since 2001.  We have built over 300 across Sullivan, Ulster and Dutchess Counties.  Our clients are mostly NYC metro professionals, successful and with a good eye for design.

We are seeking a professional who can lead, can wear multiple hats, and is not afraid of jumping in across the design, construction and operations front.  This person is supported by a full staff of day to day operations staff, in the office and remote.  The job requires a ‘can do, can figure it out, no job is not my job’ small business mind set.   Waking each morning ready for whatever challenges come their way is critical.  Not for wallflowers.

Some specific skills that are helpful include MS Office proficiency from Word, Excel, Powerpoint.   Comfort with Revit is helpful but not necessary.  Google Drive, email organization and general software comfort level required.  The successful applicant will be uber-organized, with an ADHD need to maintain and spread that organizational habit across the company.

Familiarity with construction and the work and product flow of a new residential home build is essential.

This is an in-office position, Monday - Friday, 8-5pm.   It pays $100k+, comes with retirement and healthcare, and a 24/7 use of a car.

This is a busy company building legacy homes across the Hudson Valley.   The successful applicant will see their work built across a large swath of the gold coast of the Hudson Valley.

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Sitting by Lake Moomaw, in western Virginia, one hour west of Lexington VA, south of the Monongahela National Forest, east of the New River Gorge, about 1:30 northeast of Roanoke VA.   Took the traveling Van - a 2022 Ram Winebago Travato - out for the first trip.  It’s camper van, portable office with a full bathroom, kitchen, sleeps 2 or 3, solar panels, gas stove, microwave, running water, refrigerator, heat, AC and a lot of other bells and whistles.  I spent a month plus getting to know the vehicle and learning to the best of my ability how to use the Van.  I don’t run much equipment, and this thing has a lot of equipment, completely new to me.  I guess once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty leveragable across all RVs and Vans to some extent.

It’s got 110 power, 220 power, it’s got ‘chassis power’ and ‘van power’, its got ‘generator power’ and you got ‘boon docking’ travel (not being hooked up to water and electric) and that’s a lot different then when in a campground with facilities and hooked up directly to power and water.

It’s gone well, and I’m experimenting a lot with all the systems and measuring and monitoring them closely with the modern gauges and electronic dashboards that show the levels of propane, fresh water, solar power, and how full your waste tanks are.

Currently, I’m 40 hours ‘off-grid’ and still have plenty of water and electric.

The real destination is Asheville NC, and the Biltmore mansion and hotel, after riding the Blue Ridge Parkway for awhile - like a couple of days.  I tend to travel this way - pick a completely random spot on the map, go there, rough it a bit and then work towards luxury, which I’m sure the Biltmore will have no trouble providing, in between our clay shoots, horse-riding, mansion-touring excursions.  

I have Lulu with me and my Friend Anne.  Our first stop, after leaving Milford PA was Lexington VA, for the Virginia Barrel Racing Classic, where 2000 girls and women competed for the crown of who can navigate a triangular set up of barrels for the quickest time.  16-17 seconds was the most common, in the 15’s rare, but the winner would have to beat 14.92 seconds, which is darn quick.  It was a big event of horse people, horse trailers, dogs, etc…. I’m sure the people on the circuit see each other all the time.  Big arena.  4 day event.  We had our boots shined.

Out here by Lake Moomaw, this is serious Cracker territory.  Strong, almost comical Southern accents among the red-necks - where Appalachia meets who knows what. I’m not judging since I'm a stone's throw from being white trash myself. Basically, guess what I'm saying is there is not a lot of airs being put on out here.

Trying to decide if camping, or more accurately, campgrounds are for me.  I like to control my environment, especially of sounds, and campgrounds are a bit of a free for all.  You can be stacked right on top of each other, people make a lot of noise with their kids and firewood chopping and TV’s and carrying-ons.  We pulled into Lake Moomaw, which is REALLY out there, and right beside us was a family of 4, 2 young kids with 2-3 year old who would not stop crying, screaming, laughing, repeat - but mostly crying and screaming, which is a lot louder in a completely quiet environment - it felt like an SNL skit, and luckily the National Forest campground was not full and we could move our lakefront camp spot to an off lake but quiet space.

Until literally (8) 20-somethings, their baby, and 4 dogs including 2 large German Shepards, poured out of two tiny cars at 8pm as the sun was going down.  They had 1 tent, and were as country as country gets but worked as Unit, like a hive of ants, to set up the camp, gather firewood, drinking their soda pop (not a bottle of water to be found), and hang 2 hammocks.  The next day there were out at the break of dawn with their fishing rods and women and dogs, and disappeared for the day, only to come back around 5, swim, pack up camp just as efficiently and off they went.  Interestingly, to a team manager like myself, I watched, or rather listened to them, and nary an instruction was heard.  Everyone knew their tasks, the men worked together hunting and gathering, and I’m sure the women-folk did their part at the campsite. They kept their voices low.  And poof, they arrived, they did their thing, and poof, there they went.

The lake is pretty big, so when the only boat on the lake, anchored 150’ off our site (which we returned to after the screaming toddler family left) and had a boat load of joy-loving, screaming kids jumping off the boat in a circular jump, scream, splash, routine that went on for hours, the adults played loud music and swore as casually as a dog licks her ass.

So, yes, it did feel a bit unexpected to arrive at a wilderness campsite and be impacted by humans to such a level and maybe a camera was going to pop out of the bushes and say ‘haha, got you’ for some viral punk stunt, but here we are on day 3, and not a sound to be heard but lakeside birds singing to each other, the soft hum of conversations a few sites over, and the soft smell of someone’s campfire.

I take that back - we seemed to be inadvertently parked under a squirrel playground of tree-scrambling, nut-dropping, squirrel-screeching orgy of activity.

Visiting our neighbor who keeps getting older on us after a health scare.

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I say, and for the most part it is true - that for 20+ years, I’ve woken up and run this company of mine like it’s a start up, just getting off the ground.  There is little to no administrative fat in the ranks, there is little to no waste of time, little to no costly inefficiency of poor organization.  I wake up every morning breathing fire, and pushing for a productive day.  Ask anyone who gets my 4:45am texts.

That was true even as I say that the last few years I delegated a lot of the client-facing day to day operations.  There was/is plenty to coordinate beside tile and kitchen selections.

I bring this up because as the business owner who runs their large company like it’s a small company I rarely see something in the business without seeing a way to improve it.  We are going through that right now with our marketing, incorporating cutting edge renderings into our marketing efforts of our new homes.

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Frankly, it’s amazing what can be done currently in the realm of - let’s call it ‘artificial design”, as in ‘artificial intelligence’ but wow that sounds horrible so let’s try something else, like ‘computer renderings’ (ugh), ‘digital design’ - ummm, that’s not terrible.

What it is is a combination of our stock photos from when we take pictures of houses as we complete them, and a computer-generated enhancement of the photo, as well as the addition of new colors, landscaping, outdoor furniture and other accents on the outside.  They can change the large- the colors- to the small, like the color or style of the front door or stone around the porch columns.

On the interior, they can take pictures of a home we built in the past and change the floor colors, the kitchen, the paints, and then add room by room furniture. 

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The problem that I saw in the past with this stuff is the execution was only fair, and it looked artificial and to me once it looked less than 100% real, then it wasn’t worth doing. But the other week my friend and realtor extraordinaire Erik Freeland showed me a house he is marketing and I was blown away by the digital design of the interior and that opened my eyes as to what is really possible for us.

And because we sell so many houses before they start or make much progress, it’s easy to see how valuable this would be to the potential client, in terms of informing and inspiring them to buy from us.

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Our newish employee Jordan comes from a strong design background and has been leading the charge for the digital design of 11 homes - we aren’t talking about what type of fixtures we are using, it is more like ‘what this house could look like’.  And I got to tell you, it’s a game changer.

But it’s a game changer for the same reasons it’s always been - I didn’t stop trying to improve our offerings and our process, I know the company well enough to know what still could be improved, and then I insisted on quality when we endeavored on this new initiative.  And you can’t neglect the one variable that has always been true - I have good taste and a good eye - I don’t deserve to have either since I don’t really come from any background that would lend itself to that talent, and I never in anyway developed formally that talent, but it is there, and it runs through everything we do - an eye that knows when something is good looking, and aligns with the design inclinations of our clients.  You can do whatever you want, but if it is generic, or lacking in pizazz, that does have a measurable impact on it’s impact on the business- our business has always found a lane because our design eye has always been sharp.

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 But to circle back - even this exercise of digital designing is not done leisurely.  I want it done, fast, as well as it can possibly be, and out the door and into production.  There is zero value for me in a partially completed project, however awesome it is. There is no time to waste in a startup, and while we may not be that anymore, we still definitely act like everything is on the line, everyday.

To circle back to another point, one of the hardest parts of leading any initiative is truly evaluating what is possible- from a budget vantage, and more importantly, from a talent and time vantage.  Seldom, and possibly if ever, have I had the luxury of saying ‘make this perfect’ - ‘go back to the drawing board’, ‘start from scratch’ ‘do another draft’.   On the path of many if not all of our initiatives over the last 20 years, there is a hard to accept but critically important aspect of knowing your team well enough to know when you’ve reached ‘pretty good’ and ‘we can live with that’ - where ‘pretty good and done’ outweighs ‘perfect’ - I’m not really talking in construction, but everything else from book-keeping to marketing, to design, to tracking sales leads to fleet management to a million other things we do each day.  There is just truly diminishing returns of chasing a level of execution that isn’t available at the moment - you can yearn for it, you can keep it in mind for another day in the future, you can nurse your heartbreak, you can bookmark it, but you got to keep moving, and many times that involves the heartbreak of not a reaching level of finish you were hoping for, but dialed back as other urgent needs require attention, and as you always must, you prioritize and allocate scarce resources in a fashion you see as most pressing.

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