Skiing and building houses
Wow, this winter is now seriously getting annoying. It has been annoying, but now we have another week of arctic temps, freezing rain, light and obnoxious snow cover. From my homes in Phoenixville PA the whole way up to Fremont and Parksville NY, just obnoxious. Really glad I only have a few homes going since progress would have been tough. I’m tempted to just shut it all down for a week - something I’ve never done - just to let this final week of winter roar through. In 8 days, it looks like we get some reasonable winter temps. I got home from Vermont and my entire home and building territory is covered with 2” of ice. Didn’t think I was going to make it up the driveway.
Up in Vermont, for our 14th or so annual sojourn with a revolving set of family members. Started in 2015 or so in Stowe, and migrated to Killington in 2020/2021. For the various skill levels of skiers that accompany us, Killington is the better mountain. More diverse terrain, bigger mountains, less over the top in terms of approach to skiing/resorts, etc… But expensive - lift tickets for a single can approach $200 for a holiday weekend. Me, my brother, wingman nephew, Lucas and two of his friends.
It was a tale of two cities up here - Friday and Saturday clear as the eye can see and hardly a whisper of wind. Great conditions with some fresh powder. Late in the day a predicted storm blew with low visibility and snow, which turned into a ski-able sleet. Actually a great day of skiing. We are ski in ski out like ballers do, but up and down Vermont - from Stowe to Killington - driving into the resorts was a nightmare with the snow/sleet coming down, slickening roads, and causing traffic havoc with no solution. Many people didn’t get to the mountain till lunch or later. They were calling for the possibility of a major snow event, but the wet sleety snow took a lot of that thunder away.
But overnight, winds whipped up to 50-6 0mph, rattling our 1980’s chalet to the core. Lucas and his two friends are hoping to get some skiing in this morning, but I’ll let that up to them to test the elements. You never know with kids - if they don’t want to let it bother them, sometimes they are immune to it all. On the same hand, if they want to let something bother them - like being tired when it’s time to study, nothing can be more troublesome. Since I’m finishing up this post a few days after the weekend, I can report we didn’t ski, and did not have a lot of fun packing up 7 people and a van in high winds and whipping snow.
My son is quite the skier now - but that brings another set of worries now that he's zooming down the mountain at 60mph, whipping in and out of trees and launching off jumps.
I’ve added some team members to the office, which is exciting. I’ve been searching and seeking on how to reinvent after my main person left 2 years ago. I scaled up, I stayed the same, I scaled down. Grew, shrank, rinse, repeat. The jobs I was looking to fill are good jobs, paid well, serious benefits and challenging in a good way. Being a small office, the mojo and culture of the place, as well as the person, is important. Hiring is never easy but one thing that is different this time around is that I know exactly what I’m looking for - with well-defined positions and job descriptions. It’s tougher than you would think, describing a position at a small business with its fingers in lots of different pies. Cross-talented, adaptable, learnable. So I’m excited. Trying to dial in the business to something sustainable to me and my employees without conquering the world everyday. Working hard to figure out how many houses to build, and other assorted revenue streams, to get to that magic number.
The magic number to me as I ride off into the sunset in yet some undetermined fashion is defined as salaries, fixed expenses, benefits and as important to me as any, the ability to continue to payout handsome 401k matches, profit shares, and even a pension we have. I’m proud of a lot of things this company has provided to a lot of people, but to spin off profits consistently to me and others in the magnitude of a quarter million dollars a year comes close to topping the list. It’s pretty much unheard of.
Catskill Farms has always been profitable. Sometimes wildly profitable. Over the next 5 years, I’m happy with finding that number that allows us to retain employees, create a flexible and hard to compete against workplace, and conjure enough profits to pay our benefits. I’ve already got 2025 figured out, so that leaves me with over a year to get started on 2026. One thing Catskill Farms has never been is able to create those profits without me leading daily from the front. As we pivot a little from the precarious position of building a bunch of homes paid for by my lines of credit, to more client-driven pay as you go situations (much more common), a lot of things are more possible, since the profits on the former are driven by my push and effort and the need for speed, and the profits on the latter is just moving methodically through a building project, which is something we should be able to do.
When you got a gallon of maple syrup from Jeff Bank for Christmas, you take it with you whereever pancakes may be. Have syrup, will travel.
Below, up on the highest peak lodge, brother to right, nephew in background. He's got a puffy check, burgeoning black eye and fat lip from an interaction with a tree.
Parksville Lake Front
Turned out, in 2000 and 2001, the well-respected niche film company Shooting Gallery made a content internet play- just like everyone else in NY and CA- using the dollars of the trust fund kids, commingling film funds and other funds, obfuscation with the accounting and just a lot of fast and loose with the book-keeping in hopes of cashing out in a IPO - ie, the dot-com boom and bust era.
We had a floor of desks and chairs and fake employees. We began hiring and launching some of the first quality content on the internet in terms of production quality, well ahead of its time. As for real employees the company went from 15 to hundreds in months, most with nothing real to do.
The problem with being well ahead of your time - be it Michael Bury when he was shorting housing stocks or electric car makers before ubiquitous charging stations - sometimes the infrastructure isn’t there -so while Shooting Gallery had access to and hired some of earliest content creators, the layer over layer of film production quality video couldn’t fit into the narrow pipes of the broadband at the time.
So the highly anticipated internal launch of the ‘website’ stumbled worse than the Obamacare website rollout, buffering, halting, crashing and I’m not sure if the NYC bandwidth capacity ever got there before the Shooting Gallery went down in the storm of the dot com bubble, taking down a new large investor/takeover company - wait for it, a mining company from Canada - can’t make this stuff up - just was the sign and nature of the times. In the end, the content play was right on, it was just 5 years or more ahead of the technology to carry it.
We are struggling through the winter trying to get things done in one of the coldest winters - sustained cold with no breaks - that I remember in awhile. Not a ton of snow, but some very low temps and recently some snow/ice overnight making travel treacherous.
Our house up in Parksville is dancing and swerving like a good Saquin Barkley rush (I feel I’ve used that recently before) around the weather, but moving ahead and by the time spring starts to sprout, we should be well on our way to roughing in and gaining momentum. It's been such a pleasant rewarding experience working with this family. One of the hard lessons - but what lessons provide the more benefit than the hard ones - one of the hard lessons of that 2 year nonsense I went through with a bunch of morons up north is that my time and mental tools need to be allocated to productive things - not the biggest challenge, not the hardest hill to climb, not the driest row to hoe. It's the temptation of an person who is used to solving hard problems to pick the hardest to pursue - it's just in our DNA. Learning to pass that up, to leave the stress-induced dopamine surge - to let that go, that's not easy for a professional problem solver, and hand to hand combat veteran.
Went to the Eagles v. Commanders game in Philly - what was it, the NFC championship - great game, great seats, enjoyed the time with my son. We parked about 2 miles away so had a birds-eye view of the throng of celebration that was Broad Street - a crush of fans, that actually felt a little unsafe, and was the first crowd I was ever in that grew so tight I could see how if someone fell, they would have a hard time getting up. Lucas and got out of there - I'm not one for big crowds like that, especially exuberant drunk ones.
Turns out our seats in the Red Zone, c. 15 yard line, was a great place to watch the 80 point scoring game, with Barkley's first one right towards us, and many more after that.
I was in the city, parked on W. 30th around 7th Avenue, and I guess that was a vibrant fur trade at one time with lots of fun stores still there. If I lived somewhere fancy, I would have bought this jacket for sure.
Feeding the boyz, with the help of the gallon jug of local maple syrup that my bank, Jeff Bank, gifted me over the holidays.
The dinner out in the West Village was nice, and just so happened to be right in the era of my late night wonderings in 2000/2001 - in ungentrified, sticky, late night revelry in places like the White Horse Tavern, Maries Crisis Cafe and Smalls Jazz Club - all while still serving the souls of the late night. Now serving the people who have their shit together for the most part.
Kind of a wild few days - flew to St Petes, for 48 hrs, flew to Newark to pick up my car and rendezvous with my son, drive to Philly, back to Milford, for a few days then into NYC for a nice evening. My flight from EWR to Tampa at 5pm Thursday was one of those experiences where you board a plane, sit there for 45 minutes, then deplane because of some issue. Luckily, another plane was leaving in 30 minutes and I guess I was the first one to book the last seat on that one, so only delayed an hour or two.
Unit 1701 is looking good in St Pete's. Going to try and rent it for 6 or 7 months at $7k a month.
Name dropping and deep hyperlinks.
In August of 2001, I was picked up in some outdated oversized car from a part-time realtor connected with The Rural Connection. The Rural Connection was/is a real estate company that had a small window front shop on Barrow Street, that advertised farms, houses, and other assorted abodes for unheard of prices, even back then. We are talking $140k for a farm and 40 acres. I bought my first house - a 400 sq ft wonder built into and on top of a rock ledge way back when - we called it the Rock House - I bought it for $24k, and I bought it with one of those credit card blank checks that used to come in mail. Randy Florke - model, designer, married to eventual NY Congressman Sean Maloney - was the pied piper broker who painted rural dreams in vibrant colors.
So I was picked up by a gentleman, and he showed some homes and probably hit on me, and I picked one abandoned, partly through a remodel, with a steep short undriveable drive to the home in Cochecton NY. It was listed at $32k, and was owned by I Have a Dream Foundation based in NYC, having received it as a donation of sorts from someone.
I was living in NYC at the time; this was one month or less before 9/11. I had zero for money, had just a few months earlier been laid off by the Shooting Gallery, an enterprising independent film company before independent film companies proliferated. It employed the sons of Henry Kravis and other sons of wealthy families, families whose offspring not only came with ‘film ideas’ but ready cash from family trusts to finance the Shooting Gallery films, including such early winners such as Sling Blade and the earliest and youngest Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me. Such funds were immediately deployed by the fast-talking co-founder Steve Carlis - you can still find him on the internet long after the high point, still with the same bio picture. His creative partner - Steve was the money and fund-raiser - his creative partner, Larry Meistrich.
Film companies attracted a very strange crowd back then, everyone excited to be in film business, half looking for their break. CJ Follini’s mom bought his way in to manage the creative commercials division but stuck in ‘facilities’ dealing with primadonnas complaining about being hot or cold. I worked directly for CJ (and if I had half a brain this could have been a train I followed to the top). Carlis was a master of promising one thing and delivering another. You can do that and get away with in film, since everyone just wants to be close up to it.
I was dating, or had recently broken up with Mara Buxbaum, a PR agent to the stars, trained under the best, Leslie Dart (this is a guess) and then off on her own with a trifecta partnership at idPR, which was a huge hit. I used to hang with Eddie Burns, Sean Penn, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and was in the room when Nicole Kidman called our apartment early one Sunday morning in a tizzy about some death or divorce. Michelle Williams was a pet project who credits Ms Buxbaum with both sage career advice and friendship when it counted, especially through the Heath Ledger drug death. I remember being at Al Pacino's NYC pad and asking him what his opening move in a chess game was, as he had a chess board set up prominently.
It's fair to ask how I got caught up in all that and the simple answer is my pure animal magnetism caught a whole host of unsuspecting upper class women in my web of unreadiness. If I had 1/10 the game of Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley I could have really made something of myself
Anyways, back to me! So, somehow I’m in contract to buy this house at age 31, having visited Sullivan County exactly once. I had no car, no plan, little in the way of money. But, unemployed and idle hands are the devil's playthings.
9/11 then happens, and I’m on the 11th floor or something of the new (at the time) Scholastic HQ on Prince Street in SoHo, and had a window framed view of both planes. Stay in the building, or go to the street? What was safer?
I got down the site early on 12th. As I got closer I found a yellow Con Ed jumpsuit, throw it on, and explored the area for 6 hours. Sometimes in the bucket line removing debris, other times off on my own climbing stairs in a damaged building that could fall, with all the sirens and alarms of all the buildings around ringing their individual songs. Pre-cell phones - these are camera photographs.
In this picture below, at one of the adjacent buildings, empty, destroyed I came across this scene, which seems similar to the one above - life, interupted, mid-stroke.
But look harder at them- who is drinking beer at 9am the morning of the attacks - No One before the attacks? This was a resting place and retreat of some crew of fireman or police workers or whoever was dowe there breathing that dust moving concrete of 100 story buildings by a 5 gallon bucket through a chain of 100 men. The above, a genial breakfast scene unyet disturbed in their morning routine. Below, at least for a moment, held a crew of men looking out on the unfathomable, after working without pause in the pile. Having a beer, on the house, fraternizing, in a small bunker, beside Ground Zero.
More than once, an alarm would sound and the concrete mountain of men would scramble - the makeshift alarm indicated another building might fall, and we would all run in a slow random direction over the uneven concrete.
I have a lot of memories of that span of time. - August and September, 2001. The tech market crashed, startups collapsing all around, terrorist attacks - all in America's densest city, a ringside seat to history. One memory was auditory - the lack of sirens, even though first responder vehicles from States around showed up to help. Thousands of emergency vehicles, and not a siren. There were no rescues that day.
Mental meanderings and houses getting snatched up
Turns out, I’m still wired to the 5am-7pm days. Still wired to get out to the job sites when they are quiet on Saturday and Sunday mornings and make some notes and lists and action items. Still able to make accurate market predictions as it appears our 3 homes for sale being snatched up and deal pendings in the first 3 weeks of the new year - like I suspected, a slow market in the fall was just a pause as the election dust settled and the corporate bonuses figured.
The above pic is a house we are building in North Branch, it's a heating 'ear' fueled with propane, that is kept on low. It was about 6:45 am and was giving off a pre-dawn glow. Somewhat spooky, somewhat cool - the burners give off a hissing, and smell lightly of propane. I typically use all my senses when entering a house - sight, smell, sound, aware of my feet and any nails, or seams or flex in the floors. It's hard to teach what I know, and to do it well would mean having someone attached to my hip for 6 months as a I go about my daily routines, and being somewhat of a loner, that sounds like a real not-fun scenario. And honestly, unless you are paying for this shit, it's hard to be as invested as I am in troubleshooting. Thing is, with the size we are as a business, I can still move the needle on what comes into my pockets by paying close attention to the operation's details.
The incredibly tight inventory is juxtaposed with buyers not in a rush and sticking close to their calibrated first offers. It’s an interesting marketplace with a lot of the new construction spec building hard to find now, both a product of the lack of land available for speculative purposes and lots of new entrants into the business of building homes without a buyer pre-arranged exiting with their tail between their legs as the finicky marketplace teaches hard lessons.
Looks like we are going into contract on the house below.
But there’s a black swan event developing for the local marketplace and that’s the fires out west. It is easy to envision the professionally displaced coming East for a bit to let things play out out there, and they will need housing and maybe once again as in 2020-early 2023, everyone in the housing market Upstate will look smart as buyers swamp and swallow up every home for sale. The shock is too new to lend credibility to this market guess, but I feel it’s hard to think that it won’t add buyers to the Market.
It’s -12 degrees in Parksville, near Livingston Manor. It’s -6 in Milford, in NE PA. My son is dying for the diesel engines of the buses to have trouble starting. I’m not sure why- I guess out of principle of being a kid - he actually loves his school and his friends. We had a nice snow storm on Sunday pre MLK day. Lulu tracks in the snow.
It’s been 2 years of struggle to remake the company after my right-hand woman lieutenant left but I feel I’m on the precipice of finalizing it. It’s been tough - as tough as anything I’ve ever done - can’t say more tough, since some of the rows I’ve hoed have been extraordinarily tough, but not easy, and definitely not easy since I was a bit exhausted from the Covid sprint. But like David Goggins, or the Navy Seals BUDD camps - you can’t count on the finish line - you need to leave some gas in the tank at all times since there is no predictability to business building or business sustainment.
Looking out over the Delaware River from NE PA, Milford.
Planning our ski trip to the 3 Valleys in France Alps.
Ran around to most of my houses the end of last week into the weekend. -
Taking Lucas to the Eagles-Commanders game this Sunday.
