Texas, Pennsylvania and all things $$
I wanted a few days away, close to home, but something nice, so I took a look at Wildflower Farms in Gardener, Innes in Kerhonkson, and the famous Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. It’s late in the season for leaf poppers and would seem like these places would be transitioning to their slower routine of winter, but I guess not quite yet. I’m not particularly price sensitive, but each of these places had room plans that started at above $1000 a night, one pushing $2000 a night. I travel a lot, so I can say with certainty that this is an above average room rate.
It makes me think at times I have a psychological and economic detachment from this one segment of the upstate economy - this visiting and tourism circuit of $5000 weekends. I ended up at the Mohonk Mountain House, a large establishment on a New Paltz bluff founded in 1890’s and expanded ever since. Quintessential Inn experience. It’s early on Monday morning, we are fogged in. I sit in the reading room. You forget at first if you arrive at check-time at 4pm, it’s dark at 4:45.
I’ve recently been struck by the concept of shrinkage, where product sellers don’t raise the price of an item, but rather shrink the item they are selling. Cereal is infamous for this, or chips, where the bag or box stays the same but the amount in the box/bag gets smaller. I really noticed it the other day at Pizza Hut in Houston - their personal pan was literally an offense to a hardy appetite.
I’ve been inundating myself with a wide range of reading, vacuuming it up in wide and varied swaths, adding the contextual layers from which I understand the world, understand my place in it, and understand my business and personal strategies derived from it. So many metrics, data, theories and guesses about what comes next in the economic cycle.
Healthcare right now is scary for individuals not attached to a large corporation or to small businesses. Rates have climbed steadily for the last few years, and now they are set to jump. This is a zero sum game for small businesses - every dollar increase is a dollar not invested elsewhere, a dollar out of the pocket, a dollar not spent on new employees, equipment. With annual premiums topping $15k for a father and son, $10k for an individual, $25k for a family, and then deductibles of $5k, $6k, $10k before the policy even kicks in, the absurdity of the American healthcare experience grows. At some point, perhaps already past, where just choosing a catastrophic plan that kicks in at $100k of medical expenses makes sense and self-funding the first $100k with savings from NOT buying health insurance. It’s definitely one solution for those with access to savings or investments, or who take the risk for 5 years while building up the reserves.
Healthcare and higher education should not be the burden on the American experience like it is. It’s just absurd, and the idea that a bunch of working stiffs support a political party that strips them, fights against, such a human right, is another layer of absurdity.
Trump is right, when he was caught on camera back before he was president, commenting on the stupidity of the average American. It’s not conjecture - it’s a reality. You have the stupid and you have the self-serving who feed off the stupidity at the extremes of our society.
You have this argument and debate with every new political football about its ‘socialism’ components, which again, is an absurd debate on many levels. The American Experience is already, and has been, a mostly socialist country for a long time - corporate welfare to an extreme, healthcare to everyone over 65, welfare, SNAP, WIC, unemployment, Head Start, free school lunches, - you name it, we have it.
I just realized I’m getting to the age where my peers and now me start to have parent issues of a medical nature and the new experience of figuring out a plan to care for them, or assist them, or participate in their lives in some new fashion.
It's been an exciting year of High School football, with another thriller in the rain last Friday. We were down 17 zero in the first quarter and it looked grim, but clawed back and took the win. This is the 3rd thriller this year, games that went down to the wire. Been running all around Pennsylvania state for these Friday Night Lights.
My son Lucas, #7, lost the starting QB role to his best friend Colin, #8, but loves being part of the team nevertheless.
I remember when I was 18-25 I would go days if not weeks without talking to or hearing from my family. When I traveled after college it was spent mostly without contact with them. It’s such an odd juxtaposition to nowadays, where even independent parents expect to know where their kids are more or less all the time and expect to hear from them via text or tele every day if not more. I’m undecided about the pros and cons, but for sure it can make you feel overly needy by needing that child validation on a daily basis. I try and think back and reassemble how anything happened on time or in an organized fashion prior to handheld devices - did we all just show up when we said we were going to? Was there a broader acceptance of uncertainty? I literally can’t remember.
On the homebuilding front, we are accelerating into the colder months and should be in good shape to build through winter months and have a long runway into 2026 planning.
I found myself with 3 teenagers in Houston on the way home from a NFL game in the first hints of the chaos entering our airports due to the government shutdown. 6 (SIX) hours in a security line and a full night at the airport, navigating a lack of TSA workers to process a normal Sunday night at the airport.
Kids in shock and relief exiting 6 hours of TSA wait, only to find an overnight stay in an airport is no bowl of cherries either.
New Home Construction Competition
All new construction is not the same. I know - I've been building and learning and improving for 20 years. So when I see these new 'builders' and one-off designers selling new homes for eye popping prices, I reflect on all the risk to the buyer, since all new construction is not the same, since I know, I've building and designing and improving for 2 decades and I now my learning curve has been constant.
But in the Catskills, since new construction is a new concept and realtors not really that read up on intricacies of the differences between one and the other, it occured to me, now that there is a little competition , that Catskill Farms is once again pretty equipped to compete head on with this new vs new comparision - in fact, it's in our best interest to highlight our quality, our 'under the hood, hard to see' product decisions, and to raise the bar for buyer education and open to their eyes to what 'quality', 'warranty' and 'experience' means on the biggest investment of their lives. There is, simply, a big difference between someone doing it every day for twenty years and someone who hasn't been doing it every day for twenty years.
It could be the HVAC system, and the uniform comfort it provides (or doesn't), the quality of the paint, the flashing, the insulation and efficiency that provides moment to moment satisfaction. The number of heat zones, the type of hot water heater, the level of HVAC efficiency, floor stain, etc... The decisions of new construction are many, are important and are easily made from the pocketbook impact rather than the client experience vantage. From our 2 decade perch, the client experience and the pocket book impact have significant synergies and parallels.
Currently, if you have a chance to buy or bid on new construction, the driving component is the look and feel. No one asks, or can afford to ask, too many questions about the ingredients of that new construction since there isn't another option that comes close to meeting the aesthetic requirements of the buyer and there is another buyer waiting in the wings for this unique offering. But if the house is a problem house, a new house with as many problems as an older home, if that happens I'd say it's more draining than the problems of an older house since the expectation was the home would work, and work well, and if not, someone would magically fix it.
To find out your insulation sucks, your mechanicals are off brand, your well pump is the cheapest on the shelf, your basement gets wet, your paint peels in 2 years, and you can't run 2 showers at the same time - these are things I think our homes are well-positioned to shout out and be proud of. I saw a home of one of our competitors just go into contract in Narrowsburg at a big price, and every single wood knot in the house had bled through the paint. If such a simple thing such as proper knot sealing was executed poorly, it makes you wonder what else is lurking half-assed.
This isn't to say we are perfect. Far from it. In fact, it's to say the exact opposite - that construction is complicated, impacted by weather, and no matter how good you are, no matter how hard you try, shit goes wrong. Sometimes serious shit, And that's when it really matters who built your home.
