House thoughts
You know you are feeling mortal when you take a look at your 90 page living trust and identify a hole in the detailed plan - that hole revolving around what if me and my son die together or at the same time, or what would happen if I would pass, and then he would pass without a will or beneficiaries (meaning, pass young). Turns out in PA where I live, my estate would then be considered ‘intestate’, and governed by the rules of the State, the exact opposite of what all this planning is about. And here’s the thing about all you aghast at even the thought of this - there is zero correlation between planning and dying. We all go sometime - fade off into that bright light, down that long tunnel. There is no living without dying - one defines the other - one makes the concept of the other possible. Good planning is just that - good planning. And I’m a planner and give a lot of credit to good planning for making all this all possible.
Monday night gravel ride in Milford. 5 miles in, 5 mile out. My Strava failed to kick and I'm suffering from the 'if it's not Strava it didn't happen' feeling.
So, I’ve begun making a concerted effort in my iCloud email account to unsubscribe to every email that is junk or a mailing list I don’t want to receive (i.e., 85% of them) instead of just deleting them. I’ll report back in a month if it changes the volume of junk emails I get.
We push ahead on the closing of 7 new pieces of land at prices about double what I’m used to paying. That means a lot of things, but one of them is that it costs more money to buy them. Obvious, yes, in theory, until you start writing the checks and the bank account starts dropping by 6 figures at every closing instead of after 2 or 3 closings. Surveys, septics, walking the land, dreaming and envisioning what house will go where, what will the market support from a price vantage - reverse engineering the land and house package in order to back into the best play for the market at this particular time.
My home gym.
“This particular time” to me currently means there are good buyers for the right homes at the right price and that right price is elevated for something special and profitable for our bread and butter 5 acres and a cool house. Inventory remains low. Buyers remain motivated. Good houses sell. Catskill Farms resales jump off the rack (the mature landscaping after a few years of ownership post-build and general love of property all our homeowners exhibit is clear to anyone and make the properties irresistible to prospective buyers).
Came across this resale on Rivka Road - A Ranch we built and sold in 2021/2022 during the Covid go-go times. Nice house - in fact if memory serves me correctly, it was this father-daughter duo who took our one Ranch design, and stretched and tweaked it onto we had a new design, about 500 sq ft bigger, and we’ve never looked back. I think they were Airbnbing this in the end, and that game just isn’t what it used to be - low margins, lots of work, picky clientele who are looking for a special amenity. 3 or 4 bedrooms with a porch is just a hard sell in this competitive space. The $899,000 price tag is also interesting - a little lower than I would have expected, placing it solidly in the ‘profitable’ category, but by no means a grand slam. I think we originally sold it for $710k, and was one of the homes in this 16 home project that began to come close to real market value.
Out bushwhacking and scouting land.
All during Covid, our prices lagged behind the market since our deals were made 9 months before the sales date, and prices were going up 5% a month - meaning a $600,000 price tag house was north of $700k market value when we sold it. Meaning, I lost out on a ton of profit - but I was too busy to cry in my milk too much, and I’m careful, didn’t overprice, booked a ton of deals at good prices, crept my prices up house by house. What it means is nearly everyone who bought from us in 2020-2023 have hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity in their homes.
I look at some other builders and they are literally leaving their clients under water, house after house after house. Taking every nickel of value and finding a way to charge for it, wring it from their clients pocket to theirs. Through almost purposeful inefficiency. Our entire business plan revolves around being serious about time and price, and that’s actually just rare. It’s easier to jerk people around with a smile on your face and grab every unearned nickel. Someone should do a study on how much our clients have made off of Catskill Farms homes, vs the resale value of other builder’s homes.
Lulu loves our daily off-leash walks in the Bashakill.
This inadvertent design leap and tweak I mentioned 3 paragraphs ago has happened more than once - we are working with a client with a good eye, who likes one of our designs, requests some changes, requests some more changes, and boom, before you know it, you have a new floor plan. One of our favorite barn houses happened that way. More than once as well someone - a framer, plumber - someone makes a mistake that provides a view for different layout and wallah, something new. Same thing on the barn house - a framer made a mistake and the more I looked at it the more I realized the mistake could actually be a new half bath layout. That’s the advantage of me being on the sites a lot - I catch things, and I know my homes well enough that sometimes a mistake provides an opportunity.
Many times good opportunities arise as you are digging out of a mistake. The climb out of the mistake is steep, so you look for alternatives, and then there is a brand new lane to travel, and many times we never look back - the new alternative lane and route is better, more compelling. But let’s not get carried away - many times a mistake is just a mistake and you have to through a bunch of money at it to fix it.
The big house on a lake in Fremont, just north of Callicoon and North Branch, is coming along nicely and quickly.
Now that I got this all figured out, have a pretty dynamic team, have the modular pool income stream, and look back at where I was 10 years ago - another 5-10 years of this just might be doable. Although it is getting a little annoying/concerning as members of my team - suppliers, vendors - get up and retire, leave us scrambling to fill their big shoes, many times unsuccessfully. We've been replacing some with younger newer teams, but some it's hard to see replacing them with similarly talented teams.
Che Guevara
Life goes on. Now I’m into a whole new genre of reading - teenage grief, parenting grief, general grief, etc…, with no firm timeline of exodus, surety of path or success of endeavor. Times like this is when the habit of reading matters - you can go searching, peeling back the slow wandering thoughts of others.
I just finished the 800 page tome of a book. Searching for the right word, I found ‘tomb’ also works, but is more slang, and means like it sounds - a large heavy ‘and potentially dusty’ object whereas ‘tome’ means large heavy book.
This was that. Both tomb and tome. It had been sitting on my shelf for years, given as a present to me a few years ago - intimidating in its size as well as its subject matter - Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary from Argentina. Did I really need to know that much about him?
Once I dug in, I found it very readable, both in the verse and the treatment of the subject matter. I learned a ton about a ton - American policy in South America pre-Kennedy, Cuba’s uneasy and unplanned relationship with both USSR and China, the true ambitions of Che and Castro to spread marxist revolution through each country of South America, the true believer of Che in this effort and the familial and lifestyle sacrifices he made, their efforts in Africa, that the Cuban revolutionaries numbered only in the twenties when they toppled Batista’s Government in the 50’s so on and so on. Very interesting.
My takeaways run both ways - because of all the ‘overwrought communism’ hysteria we’ve been taught was overplayed, it’s easy to downplay the aims and ambitions of Castro and Che. However, hey had every intention of repeating Cuba throughout the hemisphere. The problem of repeating it was multi-fold, and started with the lack of surprise, which was extinguished after Cuba’s overthrow. The fall of Cuba woke up its neighboring states who then fortified their internal defences as well as their intelligence gathering techniques. Three, for whatever reason Cuba’s government was so weak that a few dozen fighters could topple it was both hard to understand as well as hard to replicate in other places.
Lulu basking in the evening glow. She seems to curate her perches thoughtfully.
On the American side, a few things were at play. Long before 1961 and the Bay of Pigs, the US was messing around down there, turning most of the continent into vassal states of big business and American interests. The US’s casino and resort economy of Cuba was just the public face of a ton of interferenc, as it is now, a lot of it provoked by the success of Castro and Che in Cuba. The concern grew from a business interference problem, to a continent-wide Marxist takeover, more of the domino effect you hear about SE Asia and Vietnam. And the US leaders weren’t wrong in fearing what the Che’s had in mind and they got serious about stamping it out.
Of course, this is only one book and one perspective. However it can’t be dismissed like an AI meme since it was 800 pages not 8 seconds. I’m afraid I’m now going to be on a Cuba/South America reading binge, though this topic and books surrounding it also might qualify for my Audible listening, of which I’m quite particular of what gets read and what gets listened to.
Road biking every Thursday.
As an Audible book describes well- “a scruffy handful of self-taught revolutionaries - many of them kids just out of college, literature majors, and art students, and including a number of extraordinary women - who defeated 40,000 professional soldiers to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.” Highly unlikely, but it happened, and was never repeated,
Which reminds me of one of my maxims in my business - just cause it worked yesterday, don’t be so sure it will work today and tomorrow. That’s a trap just waiting to spring.
Business continues as I step up to the plate again, buy 7 pieces of land and take a big swing. Why not? Life is short and with my new all star team, I’m able to make it look easy. Step up and spin the wheel of million dollar speculation - a habit I picked up 23 years ago now. Good to end a Cuba post about gambling, as it was a promising mecca until Castro had his say.
Friday night light season.
Grief. It's a horrible club to belong to - tainted and estranged from the everyday pleasures, whispers and two left feet condolences. I'm not on the very front lines of it but certainly close enough, but for those who are, they carry it around, tangibly, where ever they go. Grief is heavy and loud and slippery and quiet. One minute graspable the next an infection into the soul that no hand-wringing, denials, bargaining or prayers can change.
New day new step
(if you read this previously, please note it's been fixed up - didn't realize it was a shit show editing job).
According the Financial Times, 16% of people picked a book or magazine to read leisurely last 16. 10 years ago it was 28%. Over the last 20 years, it has fallen by 40%. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a real ‘sky is falling’ statistic. Reading is knowledge, reading is empathy, reading is perspective, and reading is power. By reading, you can walk in another’s shoes, you can witness communication, articulation. It builds attention spans and imagination. It’s the wonderment of words.
The rise of social media snippets and the decline in reading means many things, most of the negative; however, it provides an open lane for the young person who does continue the tradition of reading - an easy lane, like showing up on time for work, like putting your phone away while you are at work - it’s an easy lane to gain an advantage.
One thing I’ve always done in my 25 years leading Catskill Farms, and while I can’t remember I’m sure it’s a habit before that - regardless of the situation- I get up and go to work, fulfill commitments, keep on track. What my family is going through currently is just a more significant trauma than hundreds before it, where you get knocked down and you get to decide how to react. I've trained myself to get up and do hard things - it's a muscle, that first needs to be developed, then maintained.
Times like these are where excuses are made - why you can’t pay a bill, why you can’t take a meeting, why you can’t exercise good judgment. Or they are times where you muster the mustard to to take that step forward. The setbacks are endless and continuous, and if you aren’t experiencing them, you aren’t really pushing the limits of what’s possible.
Lulu doesn't 'need' luxury, but she won't pass it up either. In that regard she's a lot like Lucas. Knows comfort when he sees it.
So I’m proud of my son for getting up each day, on time, before the alarm, and getting himself to football and other scheduled events. The day after the death - literally 15 hours later - he pulled himself together and drove to football practice. He argues with me a lot, and sure he is repudiating and rejecting each and everything I’m telling him, but I model good consistent behavior, and he copies it. Parenting is caught not taught, they say, and I’m seeing that first-hand, across the board (except for reading). Both the good and the bad.
For me, the day after the death, I put in a 15 hour old school workday - up at 4:30am, home by 7, and checking progress and emails until I went to sleep. That was more of a ‘keep busy’ type of thing, but even the days following, as the reality crept in and lingered and was there each morning, you go to work. You focus your mind. You take care of business.
MiniBarn run as an Airbnb, very dog friendly.
I think the last post I talked about ramping up the construction schedule of Catskill Farms, and chasing down a bunch of building opportunities and I might have mentioned how much I must have let go through my fingers over the last 12 months, since as soon as I closed up my finger netting, I was catching a lot of fish to feed the large dependent Catskill Farms family. It’s cool, 25 years in, to be able see the ebbs and flows of what I’ve built with a more cool-hand and light touch. Because even what I don’t know poses little risk anymore, since I always have an idea of who to talk to about possible paths to resolution - I have the luxury of time to problem-solve, and I have a steady team to problem-solve, and I have the money to problem-solve. Tackle what I tackled for the last 2.5 decades without those above 3 things in your corner, and you learn real quick the magic of hard work and sticking-with-it and putting in the hours to bounce around from dead end abort solution to dead end aborted solution until the tinkering reveals a lane to resolution.
There’s another secret to really scaling, too - for me, it was humility. Not the type where you-have-a lot-so-it’s-easy-to-feign-generosity-and-humility (traits borne only after the risk of both are gone), but humility in that I truly believed and acted like each house I got sold could be my last.
Could be my last because if it didn’t sell, I didn’t have any more cash. Could be the last because I tried something big that didn’t work. Could be the last because of the economy. Fear is good, and it’s a good friend. Combine that with humility and experience, and you can really create a bullet-proof vest from business mis-direction.
And one of my highlights of the week/month/year, as much as a culmination of my character flaws as well as my vast competitive spirit, a friend of mine has a daughter in town from North Carolina, and she just so happens to be an D1 athlete, and she just so happened to step onto my pickleball court confidently, only to lose a best of 3 match to me in 2 games. I don't like to lose, and I dug deep to pull that one out. So I made a little trophy shrine and of course shared it with them.
John Lust, In Memoriam
To my Good Friend John. We love you.
Until our close friendship ended as collateral damage from a declining relationship with my ex, we were besties. Golfing, skiing, biking, hiking, all over the country. Enjoyed raising my son with him, trusted him as a role model for Lucas. His first death for me was when my ex cut off the relationship - so as much as anything, this reminds me of that painful period, a deja vu of sorts. Trips included yearly sojourns to Stowe/Killington, Big Sky, Powder Mountain, Miami. western NY for a covid golfing trip, and a ton of others. He was always a good travel mate - always low drama, never disappointed, and a good sport.
An obit I wrote for him sums it up well-
