French Riviera
The first full day in Nice, after arriving at noon Monday, mostly refreshed from our lie flat biz class seats from PHL to NCE. Although it needs to be said that from anywhere to anywhere, from economy to biz class, American Airlines is definitely the ghetto of the major carriers. I have a couple of million points on American from back in the day (part of my 14,000,000 reward/points/miles portfolio earned with construction purchases over the last few years) and it’s no wonder I still have them - American sucks. Even when they try hard like a transcontinental biz class arrangement, it still feels like a class-climber with aged attendants, shitty website and food quality that could generously be labeled lackluster. I like that I’ve been around enough to tease out differences of 1st class life. At this point, I’m half tempted to trade in the miles for pennies on the dollar, just because I’m not a fan of the delays, cancellations, etc… that seem related to each and every American experience, though to be honest, the soggy kinda gross breakfast might have been the final straw - I should have slept through it.
I'm gone for 10 days and during that time we will sell $2m of real estate. That will be house 4 and 5 up in Ashokan, monetizing like crazy after 26 months of outlay.
Through a small party that got smaller still as people's lives got in the way the day before leaving, but it was a nice day and the grounds were looking good.
me.
The Riviera. Of course, it didn’t take long for me to dig into Nice’s role, and position in WW2, since France was such an unfortunate victim/player/collaborator/resister in the war.
As always, I spend a lot of time walking around new cities and I think we put on 8 miles yesterday, in a pretty small city, so we saw a lot. I’m here with my nephew, who I’m travelling with since my 15 yr old would be rather home with his friends, and I’m pretty sure hates me. I’m exaggerating - he might not hate me, though it seems like it, but he definitely wouldn’t relish 2 weeks with me, solo, traveling.
So we are getting a lot of ‘wow, I wish I had a uncle llike that’, who flies them biz class transatlantic to a swanky airbnb 2 blocks from the Med Sea for a mostly paid for trip. He’s 27 so in a perfect position to take in the scene. Ballers do what ballers do, right?
Sitting on a 6th floor walk-up balcony getting baked by the sun around 11:30 am. Pigeons and dove dive bomb and squawk. Large planes descend into the airport. Fitzgerald’s ghost haunts the alleyways. Lot of English speaking among the natives. Bought some flowers, baguette and chocolate croissants this morning (and my nephew didn’t even notice the flowers! Men!).
We’ve been careful to clarify he’s my nephew since with his mustache he’s sporting he can look a little freddy mercury if you know what I mean, but even that gets complicated since the role of ‘nephew’ took a dark cultural twist with season 2 of White Lotus.
Day 2 - yesterday - was spent in leisure, with a slow morning, some mid-afternoon beach time, some time killing this and that, then a 10 mile electric bike ride, and then a 4 mile hike along the coast heading north out of Nice to Villefranche-Sur-Mur. I’m a bike rider but had never used an electronic bike - I’m hooked, super fun.
Day 3 with a 13 miles day trip to Antibes by electronic bicycle along the dedicated sea-side promenade and we found ourselves in the cap d'Antibes, little inlets carved into the land from the Mediterranean. Just so happens, just the area where Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night, literally. With characters of Rosemary, Dick and Nicole Diver, and a host of others, whittling the way the deco summer in the late 20's. In my final culling of my packing, which were only carry ons, I left that book at home since it seemed unlikely I would read two books while away with my reading pace these days.
Memorial Day thoughts and reflections
4 days until my 27 yr old nephew and I head out to the South of France. With a basecamp in Nice, we explore north and south from there - though I guess it’s mostly north. I think I’m going to get a shave each day at a different barber, whittle away the days with strolls and hikes and naps, and do my best to put down my damn phone. Besides our business class seats and our what looks to be a pretty fabulous Airbnb, we have zero, nunka, plans laid out ahead of time.
It’s Friday morning, and I don’t leave until Monday, mid-day, so that leaves time to throw a party on Sunday by the pool. That should be fun and the weather should be great - which is a miracle.
Our local bike shop in Milford where I live runs a few weekly ‘no-drop’ bike rides - Monday night 10+ miles of mountain biking and Thursdays 24 miles of road biking. No drop means you wait at intervals for the slowest, which can be a bit of a pain, but turns out not too bad. Even for aging gent like myself, get out on that bike enough and stamina and strength improvements are sure to follow.
I’m thinking about selling my baby, my 1972 Chevy Malibu. Why? I’m not sure. More on that a little later. But I’m giving it real consideration. I guess it’s a little bit of spitefulness because the weather sucks so much anymore, and a little bit of consolidation of assets and expenses. When you are moving from playing with $1.3m a month of cash flow, to some sort of much more fixed income existence, you start looking at every expense. With Catskill Farms, the last 4 years have been so go-go, that we piled on expenses without a lot of micro-controls. Don’t me wrong, I’m always careful with my money, but when you are doing as much business as we are/were, it’s impossible not to put on a little expense fat. We have trucks we don’t use, phones we don’t use, computers we don’t use, key man life insurance policies far in excess of the amount I borrow anymore (the bank likes me to have life insurance equal to their lines of credit limits they give me), etc… So we are looking at every expense.
But the cherry red Malibu with the white interiors I picked up 4 or 5 years ago is such a nice car - and when I say nice I don’t mean ‘nice’ like you are afraid to drive it. I mean ‘nice’ as in you can’t love driving it around. Those seats are comfy like a couch. I’ve done a few big road trips of 3000 miles plus in it, once with the dog, and once with my nephew and son. It’s not a big expense - insurance is cheap and don’t owe anything on it. But it’s a lightly used asset, and those are on the chopping block.
While you are in it, it’s hard to remember what it used to be like. Since March of 2020, me and my staff have lived a life of ‘hold on for your dear life’ of business expansion, taking a company that likes to build 6-8 homes a year and tripling that, overnight, across a two hour travel distance, within dozens of small municipalities each with their own rules. It’s only now that we are down to 9, and soon down to 7, that I begin to remember that life was not always the way it was for the last 4 years, when I used to take mental health Mondays and long weekend Fridays, in the same week, consistently.
We did that volume of business in the toughest business climate one could imagine, the Covid climate where all rules were off the table, where the rules changed on a daily basis, where people’s lives were actually dependent on our efforts, where supply and labor chains were completely disrupted. We expanded - doubled or more- right into the face of those challenges. And put 50 families into homes. And made a lot of money. And worked everyday, all day. We took our job seriously, unlike most other builders out there.
So it’s only now that we are down to 7 or 8 homes, which is still double what most building companies can handle, that the toll of those years becomes clear, as the new reduced workday reveals itself. Where every little detail doesn’t threaten the big picture.
The problem I was beginning to have - and when I say beginning - I mean for the last year or two, is I had so many problems to solve it became impossible to really understand which problems were big and which were not, which needed one type of reaction, and which needed a different type. It was just all one big tangled mess of problem-solving, employee and sub management, a hamster wheel of booking business and building homes. I carried the load for dozens of families and hundreds of vendors, subtractors and employees, let alone my family and even my dog. All needed me.
It’s nice to be needed. But it’s going to be nice not to be needed so much. To hang up the hero’s cap/cape, and just be an ordinary joe. That’s what I’m starting to see now that we are returning to our origins of 6 homes a year. Where I can just shrug my shoulders and let it be, not having to rush in to fix it.
Got my garden in, only by the skin of my teeth and the help of a good friend. If I would have left from France without getting it straighten up, it probably wouldn't have happened this year.
Baseball season is in full swing from my 45+ men's league.
And the two books Im taking on the trip. I'm a Fitzgerald fan, so I've read all of his stuff several times. Tender is the Night is set in the Riviera, in the 20's, at the height of his fame. And Death in the Riviera is hopefully tolerable as a low-effort read.
As they say in France, Au revoir. See you in a few weeks.
Friday afternoon in Olivebridge
Heavy lift after heavy lift. Problem solving after problem solving. Then two final walk-thrus on nearly completed homes.
This is Primo, who reinvented his grandfather's gas/tire/convenience store into a vital go-to general market in the Olivebridge area.
You have to zoom in to see the baby smiling to get the real impact of the joy at this meeting. These folks were the first to sign up for a home in the project.
And the young family below checking out their Ranch on 10+ acres.
Below, the Team. James, in the back, is getting ready to do a 28 mile rim to rim, one day, Grand Canyon hike over Memorial Day.
I love this style Barn house with the first floor primary suite, lots of volume of space and big back porch. This one will be for sale, but no one knows about it yet. It'll be the last one sold in Ashokan. I'm thinking I will build the whole thing and sell it, maybe with a pool and a garage. It's a beautiful piece of land.
Real estate market update
Surprise - it's raining.
It appears the big 2024 push is over. Sure, we are busier than ever, and have closings queued up monthly for the rest of the year, but the heavy heavy lift of getting stuff out of the ground is mostly behind us for now. And with land being so damn hard to find, I’m not sure when if ever we will be pounding out the work like we did over the last 15 months, or really the last 4 years since the commencement of the pandemic and the bum-rush from NYC to the Catskills.
With 2 more Ashokan Acres homes set to close in the 3 weeks, that takes that total number to 5, out of 9 total. 4 in Narrowsburg well on their way as well. The next decision will be where to go from here. Chasing the never-ending hamster wheel of squeezing margins out of immense cash flow, or something more exciting - by more exciting, I actually mean less exciting, since the act of developing/designing/building/selling can begin to seem a bit repetitive when the only goal and result is to wake up and do it again. For 24 years.
At Ashokan Acres, even the homes that aren’t complete are well along, with the least along being insulated this week. We struggled with the wells up there in terms of finding water affordably, but even that heavy lift is now complete. That project has been difficult - lots of poor weather, and lots of hard rock. We’ve hit a lot of rock when we endeavored to build a home across the Catskills, but this rock is of a different nature - it’s seriously hard. So anything from well lines, to electric lines, to septic tanks take on a different nature when you are fighting the rock of this type. The heavy lift of this development project - with the day in day out challenges - makes it unlikely I attempt to do it again soon, even if there were lots of viable plots available, which there aren’t. Land is in very short supply.
Land is in very short supply especially when you contrast it with a softening real estate market - day by day, the market is getting softer, which for us doesn’t necessarily mean less homes or lower prices, it just means the discipline to buy land priced right is even more important. Luckily, I stayed disciplined, and didn’t pay more for good land - at least not top prices. I’m definitely paying more, but still staying the course. But overall, the market is definitely adjusting to a post-pandemic return to earth status quo - I just saw the other day a good real estate company advertising ‘12 Open Houses This Weekend’ - mostly Sullivan County stuff. That’s a lot, and that should begin to bring prices down for the market in general. For us, it reminds me that staying the course and making small and gradual price adjustments to our product, instead of doubling like everyone else, keeps us perfectly able to continue to produce homes regardless of this upcoming Catskills correction. Moving fluidly, like water, with the market, as we always have.
Even with the correction, however, it doesn’t mean that there will be an abundance of land available, especially in Ulster County where it actually is near zero. Quite a few people in my business - not as long lived, hence more susceptible to exuberance - bought land and small developments where the land was going for $200k plus. Meaning a $1.5m house. To me, that was never the sweet spot, and I walked away disappointed from quite a few projects that I actually really wanted, but in the end, that pricing discipline was important, and I’d be kicking myself now if I was carrying that type of land at those prices. I think our current prices, adjusted by county, are very sustainable, and inexplicably for a market leader, below the top prices we could get.
That said, the Catskill Farms’ homes are in high demand. As always. It’s a good product, and we do a good job. And as we ‘slow down’ (defined as twice as busy and fast as anyone else) for the first time in 4 years, it’s apparent at how good we really are, and how committed our team really is, and that people who build with us really are fortunate, because the stories that paint a more arduous building journey are more often told then our repeated streamlined success stories.
