Lexus, NYC, Houses
I should’ve mentioned with the Lexus purchase that even though I’m a thoughtful financially literate person, I drove like the worst deal possible on this car. Just got caught up in the moment, and the car sales process is just really designed to leave you feeling used up - especially on a lease, where understanding what the actual cost is nearly impossible.
I have no idea why I’m leasing, since I’m not paying a $1000 a month only to return it after 3 years, plus I’m sure I’ll blow through the mileage limits without a doubt making a turn-in more or less impossible except at great cost. All in all, I could afford it so I did it, and all my pricing discipline I practice all day long just flew out the proverbial window.
But two things I learned over the last two weeks of owning it - 1, love the car and definitely made the right choice among the contenders and 2, the 36 mile plug in electric range is cool.
In NYC as we speak, and just bought my first pair of $200+ jeans. I didn’t mean to, but I went past a jeans store, and tried some on and they felt pretty good and then realized the price which wasn’t $500 but wasn’t $45 either. I haven’t bought a pair of jeans in a long while but was sort of forced to since Lucas seems to be borrowing and not returning items from my wardrobe, so I’m not sure what the going price for a good pair is (I guess depends on how you define ‘good’ - brand, material, value, etc…). They’ve come a long way since I last bought a pair - with stretchy light-weight material.
Can't say this is our best father-son photo on the tarmac at Haydan Airport, the nearest airport to Steamboat Springs, and a straight shot from Newark.
New road/driveway going in for a Big Barn on a lake in North Branch.
New Ranch in New Paltz, but we had to demo a mid-sized shack first.
We got a bunch of houses coming up - a Ranch in New Paltz, a big barn in North Branch, another big Barn in Kerhonkson and continuing at warp speed building the farmhouse in Parksville NY.
Interestingly, I spent the last year slowing the ship down to a crawl or stop. Not easy to stop a barge or boat or locomotive since what’s in motion tends to stay in motion, and from a business standpoint, if you do come to a near stop, to get back up and running again takes time and cash flow/cash reserves. But I did bring it to a halt, after 24 years of finishing and starting overlaps, sometimes with 25 houses in some stage of construction or pre-construction. And by bringing it to a halt, I could realistically recalibrate since you can’t really make the best decisions when your needs are now - you don’t have the mental, strategic, operational bandwidth to get it done. For the past 2 years I was working IN the business, instead of ON the business. Had no choice, but 2 years later I’m exactly where I should be. Powder dry, excellent staff, pruning of deadwood, clear mind, great team of subcontractors and vendors, and a little bit more purchasing and authority power since the economy is definitely slowing.
Part of the Museum of Natural History.
All in all, entering the Spring of 2025 poised for great things (defined as stability, life/work balance and fully funded profit share and retirement contributions for the team).
The media’s coverage of the stock market gyrations recently has been a degree of hyperbole usually reserved for their weather coverage and holiday airport crowd projections. The market going up 200 points isn’t ‘soaring’ or doing down 600 a ‘crash’. Everyday some over the top headline and not just from one source uniformly from NYTimes to Fox to Barrons to Investor Daily. I mean considering all the proposed economic plans coming out of the Trump Admin, the market going down 7-10% after a bull run of 8 years is hardly unexpected. The only thing is shows is how nervous investors really are generally and how long they have been willing to circle the chairs hoping there is one available when the correction comes. I’m dying for a good 20% sell off so I can get in at more comfortable levels and we could get rid of some of the dry kindling on the forest floor (overvalued stocks) which will make any blaze burn hotter (correction) creating a healthier and more sustainable investment environment. I’m just happy a good portion of my dough is in other things that than the market since I find the stock market a real mind f%4k in terms of proportionality when it comes to evaluating wins, losses, risk and reward. I mean, I’m not going around valuing my real estate holdings weekly and feeling good/bad about them.
I’m in the city, and took a long walk which I like to do. A deceivingly chilly day. Walked by the Dakota, which reminded me of the James Paterson book on John Lennon (singer) and David Chapman (assassin) I read over the winter. Paterson, the well known writer of thrillers, wrote a book that went back and forth between the paths of the two men leading up to the murder on the door steps of the Dakota as Yoko Ono looked on. Then walked through Strawberry Fields in Central Park and did a big loop in the Upper West Side.
Lexus NX450 and goodbye Mercedes E400
I just bought a new car. Traded in the 2018 Mercedes 400 E coupe for a 2025 Lexus NX450 Plug-In Hybrid. Typically my car process revolves around showing up at a dealership and walking out with a car a few hours later - or many times a company truck. Not this time. I belabored it, especially by my historical metrics, mostly since this could be a car I own for a long time.
The Benz was a nice car. 2 doors, a ton of power, great handling, good looking. With only 52k miles on it. Black and purred like a kitten and roared like a lion. But I wasn’t using it enough, and it was pretty much not that functional for me to think I was going to use it that much going forward, but at 7 years old, the depreciation was adding up - I think it went for $75k new (I bought it a year or two old) and now 7 years later worth $25k. You can see why middle class Americans stay broke or firmly financially stressed when you are falling in love with depreciating assets your whole life to impress people who aren’t really thinking about you a whole lot.
This search, however, was a lot more inadvertently extended - from the Rav4 plug-in, the VW Taos, the Honda HR-V, and the Hyundai Kona and Tucson. The problem with most of these good looking affordable reliable sub-compact SUV’s is they lack power. Press the pedal and wait, and that’s a lot different from the Benz or even my Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The Rav4 holds a special place in my heart since it was my first car out of NYC in 2001. Actually the first one was a disastrous foray into a 1977 Jeep Cherokee, a super cool, super loud vehicle that no one with little mechanical ability should ever own. So the 1998 Rav was a big pivot into dependability and has resulted in a long-term understanding of the importance of a reliable vehicle, not just for me, but for my men in their personal lives and for people in general.
Dave Ramsey has it right when he says new cars keep Americans broke, but he has it wrong when he says go buy a beater to save money. There is literally nothing more disruptive to financial planning than car troubles. Expensive, stressful, with loads of opportunity costs related to any repair. I guess it complicates his ez peazy 123 plan to get out of debt, but he should be a little more nuanced about this advice- cars aren’t like they were back when he was wheeling around in a beater - easy and straight-forward to fix. Even a 15 year old car at this point has a pretty significant computer and electronic situation - easy to fail, expensive to fix, and unlikely you can do it at home, regardless of your mechanical skill set.
So the before Lucas and I were set to hit Steamboat Springs CO for a weekend of skiing in the Rockies, I cruised down to Middletown, test drove the NX450, and a few hours later had traded in the Benz and left the lot with the Lexus. I like the Lexus brand - the Benz, especially the sports car version, was a bit much for my personal brand, a bit much of a flex. This Benz was one of the good ones, not one of the mass produced wannabes and I enjoyed it. Rode smooth, rode fast, and my only regret is I never got it onto a track. The Lexus as a brand is a bit more toned down, but for years I never really liked the shape of them - something, for me, was just not right. I guess it also had the sigma of being a grandpa car. But I think their designs have evolved, and they work for me. Bit of a flex, but not so in your face as the E400 Benz.
Got my car chargers from Amazon delivered and installed on Friday and by Saturday I was driving all electric. This car can go about 40 miles on a charge, before it kicks over to the hybrid/gas motor. That might not seem like a lot, but most of my traveling is within that range - not enough to go all electric even with a 300 mile range, but enough to go back and forth from work.
Steamboat Springs was awesome for a few reasons -1, great mountain, 2, great conditions, 3, great weather with one of the western Sunny ski days you read about, and 4, no hiccups with the flights or travel.
In Mid-April, spending 10 days in the Alps skiing with my 2 nephews, so that should be epic.
Without even trying too much, put 2 properties into contract this week - our Mini Ranch, and my lightly used shop/warehouse in Cochecton.
Punchlist day at the Forestburgh Cottage.
Cruised up to our New Ranch on 22 acres in Fremont Ny to show a family of 5 the digs.
Big views from this home - don't have a price on it yet.
Ashokan Acres, Sold Out.
960. According to a memory book I just unearthed, that was my SAT scores in 1988. 460 in Math and 500 in English. That got me into the U of Pittsburgh at the time, and a ton of other schools, which cost me maybe $9000 a year, and most of that was paid for by state and federal grants and the like.
It’s pretty much a cliche that the A students work for the C students and I can see why that is. Business building is not a linear predictable well-managed path like being a doctor or lawyer or accountant or engineer or finance, etc… Those professions and many others like it take a lot of smarts, a lot of work, but in the end the path forward is somewhat straight-forward - get these grades, go to these schools, major in these topics, intern at these places, get an entry job at xyz firm doing what is proscribed, and you follow a well-treaded yellow brick road.
Starting and maintaining a business on the other hand, there is nothing linear about it. It’s sideways as much as forward, truth be told it’s backwards as much as forwards. It’s about being wrong as much as right, though you do have to get it right when it really matters. It’s about being comfortable with chaos and uncertainty and stress and the unknowns like the sailors who set off thinking at some point the earth stopped, and was flat. As a small businessperson, you’re just out there sailing in the big ocean, tacking a course this way and that, navigating the storms, the shipwrecks, shark infested waters.
I do think the one thing that sets the professional path apart from the entrepreneurial is being comfortable with failure, or getting comfortable with failure, setbacks, restarts and catastrophes. I think a lot of people could never be comfortable with the amount of financial and personal humility it takes to chart a small business course - not grandiose humility, but that bourne from failure and not getting the job done, and being responsible for each and every dumb decision made, word spoken, over-reaction, and counterproductive antic.
And the humility, it’s not like it goes away once you mature out of the super-dumb mistakes made daily - no, as you age up and into a season where perspective is available, then you can just easily sit around cringing at all bad moves over the years.
As I self-evaluate, and I’m pretty good at it, much to my brain’s dismay, I’m able to give myself credit while still feeling the sting of pretty much each and every bad move I’ve ever made. It’s a little hard to figure out if a more fully evolved human being could have made the journey less tough, but I’m not sure as I look around. Sure, would I have had to light my way by all the bridges I burn? Probably not, but at the same time literally no one has come close to (regionally) building the business I have, in an area with few labor resources, in areas where what I was doing was brand new. We do a good job, and have gotten better each year, and most if any of my competition over the years has come, gone, and has never been seen again. I more or less created a market of new homes in the Catskills out of thin air, with an idea and hard work (and Jeff Bank).
I think of all the things that were sort of out of my control that I benefited from, the first must have been the loose regulatory environment I operated in in SuCo (Sullivan County) in 2002-2006. The cost of entry, building, and small sub-divisions was not very high, either in terms of sophistication needed to do the applications, permits, etc… but also the demands of the permits and planning boards just didn’t cost that much. That gave a person with no cash and little in the way of experience a chance to execute before the cash sand glass ran out. What the bank required of me probably would shock most regulators today.
That’s all changed. I’m currently 3 months of effort into getting a building permit in New Paltz, the town of Rochester is looking under rocks for plants they may want to protect, etc… It’s just harder, takes more skill, takes more money.
My first home, my first small project, was a subdivision - 3 lots, in the Town of Tusten, circa 2003. Had to build a road. Had to clear a bunch of land. Had to install 1000’ of underground utilities. Had to build 3 homes. With no money. Only a person who really didn’t know what they were getting into would endeavor such a thing, only a person who was comfortable staring out in the abyss of uncertainty, only a person who was ok thinking they could grow 0 (as in $0) into something mathematically possible - typically 0 is hard to grow into anything if I remember my math right, though redirect to math SAT’s so who knows.
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But at some point, Farmhouse 1, 2 and 3 were complete, and sold. The emotion I remember most about selling Farm 2 (which sold before Farm 1) was how little of a dent it made into the debt I was in. It literally took 8 years to dig myself out of the operations debt I was carrying since my margins for the longest time were thin. Credit cards maxed out, HELOCs maxed out across several properties, house builds fully leveraged - I lived like that for years. Now, I just finished pre-ordering my breakfast for Lucas' and I's ski trip out to Steamboat Springs next weekend.
And I think the only reason I squeezed thru was because my personal life was so austere - I lived in a 500 sq ft house with little in the way of amenities, low taxes, no interior upgrades, a trusty 1998 Rav4, an ancient pickup truck. No fancy equipment, no fancy trucks, no high paid employees, no big trips - just work, and revinvest, rinse and repeat, until one day, one long day after I started, the cash flow turned, and started working for me, compounding and accelerating. Then Covid hit, and those positioned well really had an opportunity.
But as I’ve said a bunch, just because you were in the right place at the right time (in this instance, outside NYC when everyone wanted to flee), doesn’t mean you were able to maximize the opportunity. The same old upstate problems existed, ie, lack of labor, lack of sophisticated office help, overwhelmed building departments and utilities - I compared it to being in a boat in the ocean - you may be surrounded by water (ie, opportunity) but it was salt water to most companies, meaning it couldn’t be drunk since the capacity to grow wasn’t there - all Covid meant to a lot of companies was saying NO more often, or worse, getting involved in projects that spelt their ruin.
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At Catskill Farms, we maximized the opportunity. We literally built 20 homes a year for a few years, with me leading from the front on a daily basis - first text at 4:30am, last at 10pm,. Every day, for a few years. The opportunity teed up a chance of a black swan victory unimaginable as we entered 2020; and as you learn about opportunities in small business, you either take advantage of them, or they fade away. You don’t get to pick the timing of the opportunity.
One truism that made life a little inside out was back pre 2016, since I was even back then the builder of the most new upstate getaways, it seemed like I was rolling in it long before I was actually rolling in it, and that created a lot of confusion at my actions. People thought I was long past fighting for survival when in fact I was still right in the midst of it.
So now I’m on the back end of untying a bunch of knots from that go-go period, a series of knots that can only be considered a small price to pay for the amount of risk, effort and construction we did from 2020-2024. One at a time, taking my time, and undoing the tightly bound knots of business building.
We finished up the project at Ashokan Acres - 9 home in Olivebridge NY. Everything about that project was both herculean and par for the course, and comes down to the simple idea that I finish what I start. You can’t do a project like that without kicking yourself for some $$ left on the table, but all in all, just as my finely attuned market sense told me in 2023, this was an opportunity, and I took it.
Barn 56 and Barn 53 have left the building.
Turn the page
Sitting in a coffee shop in Lancaster City PA, the area I was born and raised. Not the city, but one of the many rural farming areas surrounding it. This is my 4th trip down since Jan 1, because my Son Lucas is attending a football quarterback clinic organized by my high school football guru coach. He was a bit of a maniac back in the day, but that was just the way it was. Very serious winning percentage wherever he went.
So it’s a bit of haul - 2.5+ hours from Milford PA to Lancaster, and not really that easy of a drive. Sort of the northeast of PA, winding your way down 209, 80, 33, 22, 100, 222, and Route 30. We have a routine for this 8:30am clinic; we leave Saturday around 7pm, stop in Reading PA about two hours away at a Courtyard hotel, and then finish the drive off on Sunday mornings with a quick 30 minute jaunt, with a stop at the Park City Diner. Then 3 hrs at the clinic, and the drive home, in one shot.
Lucas has been driving some of it, so it’s a good way to put in some road time. Also a great way to put in some quality Dad time, though on the surface it would be hard to identify the ‘quality’ most of the time, as he pouts, goes quiet, gets upset about something, or otherwise casts shade on me and our relationship. Tis is the journey of fatherhood, and this is just a season, so I put in the time, stay quiet, crack bad jokes I know will annoy him, and turn his heat seater on high when he’s not looking at every chance I get.
I’m not sure how I missed it, but I totally missed the daylight savings change. I guess with digital timepieces, you don’t really need to be aware of it anymore. I was seeing a bunch of those ‘eliminate daylight savings time’ articles that come out twice a year, but I guess I didn’t think it was THIS weekend. So I was confused at how 5:30am felt so early. Actually I was surprised that it was 5:30 since after 3am I sleep poorly and crawl through the 3am-5am hours when I finally get out of bed and put the restlessness to good use. We were at the Diner when we figured it out; I think the waitress inadvertently informed us.
I’m surprised this isn’t a Trump issue along with the NFL new kickoff rules, paper straws and immigration - eliminating day lights saving time.
Lots of uncertainty coming our way in the construction industry. Tariffs will directly impact the cost of building a home, in ways that are known to be inflationary, but the exact extent of it will be hard to gauge until we are in it. Looks like we are good through 2025 with our contracts in hand, but we will need to be careful to risk share the uncertainty with our vendor partner and client partners. I don’t mind challenging conditions - I’m a veteran with a nimble blitzkrieg type of team, so bring it.
Lots of good things all around developing, each one took my full participation mentally, financially and strategically. Friday we sold our 8th of 9 homes in our Olivebridge project and Monday we sell our 9th. Another Catskill Farms project sold out. No one has the track record we do of finishing what we start. Rinse and repeat, year after year, decade after decade, economic conditions be damned. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t mind challenging conditions, and I think it makes my job not easier, but more straight-forward, as the competition that springs up during heady times fades away. This will be my 5th season, so to speak. I break the seasons down as follows:
- 2002-2007 - Learning curve with strong sales environment
- 2007-2011 - No competition, good sales, tough sales environment (but good team building environment)
- 2011-2019 - Malaise in the marketplace with low margins but steady growth
- 2020-2024 - GoGo times
- 2024-2026 - Survival of the fittest.
I put to bed an elongated electric infrastructure problem, I laid the final gravestone of that ligation that distracted me for 2 years, I finalized a few new home builds in the ‘your land our homes’ division, fired and hired successfully across the company, and positioned us for a few years of modest home building engagement.
It’s been a crazy 2 years- but you get up, evaluate the challenges, and tease them apart until you have something actionable. The challenges of the small business gig are never-ending and unpredictable - and the worst part of it is that at the worst moments many times there is an opportunity hiding in there somewhere you need the bandwidth to visualize.
My rental lake house in Fremont NY is entering it's 3rd lease, so that's been a big win in terms of monetizing an asset without selling it and paying the taxes. I'd live there in a second.
