Costa Rica, 2024
On a plane to Costa Rica with my nephew Eli, apparently my traveling wingman until he gets a girlfriend or something. We are going for 10 days or so. My son and his friend Cameron are also along but I haven’t seen them for a bit since they are in the back of the plane. They are coming home Tuesday night to get back to school after the extended Thanksgiving Holiday.
We are heading to the Guanacaste region on the northern Pacific side of country just below Nicaragua. The rainy season was supposed to wind down weeks ago but rain it has, mostly every day for most of the month of November. Then came a hurricane, Sara I believe, that pushed the saturated land over the edge and pretty significant flooding occurred, damage, etc…. The one international airport we are to fly into - Liberia - suffered damage, sinkholes and degraded pavement to the point they had to shut it down, which is a gigantic impact on the mostly tourism-funded area and put our plans in flux.
So we are landing into an area 5 weeks of economic activity lost and then walloped by a hurricane. The omnipresent greeting and otherwise sentence fill-in “pura vida’, translated roughly as 'the pure life or simple life', will be challenged. A lot of this blog post was written prior to leaving, but only posting now several days into it. On the flooding front, in the Tamarindo city area, no evidence of anything awry.
Business continues to decline on one front - spec home building - while exploding on another front - custom homes or ‘our homes your land’ initiatives. While both exercises involve building homes, the way I’ve done it for 24+ years - getting a deposit, and getting paid at the end for the majority of effort - involved a ton of effort and risk. Building for people on contract, getting paid as you go, is really kids stuff, after earning your wings cash flowing the whole project, 5 or 10 or even 20 houses at one time. I never thought I’d like it, custom home type of the thing, but I actually do like giving up some control, ceding it to an architect and being the smart tool instead of the driver of everything on the project.
When I see how some other builders do it - where they force the client almost to become the contractor, kind of ‘lending’ their subcontractors to the clients to schedule, meet with, troubleshoot with, sort of ceding their whole job to the client. It’s weird - our clients would be hard-pressed to name one of our subs by name, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In fact, most real contractors demand the clients not talk to the subs in any material way in order to avoid mis-set expectations and mis-communications.
The 6" grasshoppers were a surprise.
My nephew, a 27 yr old biz grad who is now in the construction bonding industry showed me a shocking graph of the median age of a homebuyer presently in USA - 57 years old. At first, when I thought it was the ‘average’ I was really taken aback, but now that I understand it’s the median, I’m little less sure what it actually means - half the buyers of homes are over 58, half are under 58. Regardless of the final meaning, the trends are stark and clear. First time buying age has risen from XXX to XXX in just 15 years - Most times the ‘average’ is the least reliable metric easily influenced by a small number of outliers, but here I’m thinking the median - half over half under - might be harder to tease out the meaning, since we are talking only about home buying age people and that can only really realistically range from 30 to 70, thus making the statistics vulnerable to a few large outliers.
At Catskill Farms, we don’t really participate in that marketplace - we exist in our on little ecosystem - with buyers aged from 30 - 75+, many with another residence of some sort somewhere. Low down payments, cash scarcity, leaving the closing table with empty pockets turned inside out, - that’s not my marketplace. But it is my world, working with a large group of hard-working professionals piecing it together.
Night biking through the woods with our Milford bike club.
We had a big year - and we have some homes to sell, but I’m not too motivated right now. I think the whole marketplace needs a post-election breather - time for the dust to settle, time for the bonuses to be paid, time for a ‘life goes on’ talk in the mirror, just like after the real estate collapse of 2008, just like the market crash of 2009, just like the non-plus years of 2011-2020, just like the pandemic, just like since then, and you can take a page out of Shawshank Redemption- when Andy says to Red - "Get busy living, or get busy dying.'- what I’ve seen over 25 years, it’s best just to keep on living, make the micro decisions in spite of the macro currents and winds. There ain’t a family who didn’t buy from us into the teeth of the 2009 real estate collapse - when banking underwriters were calling employee’s places of work at the closing table to make sure they still had jobs - even those who braved a world wide financial panic to get on with their lives, ended up enjoying their homes, paying their bills and reaping both life rewards and financial rewards. History, be it financial or political seems to move in 5 year and 10 year cycles - you’ll catch some right, you’ll catch some wrong, but most you will daily cost average into a lifetime of decision-making that averages out over of a lifetime - if the past is any indicator of the future. Quite a few of our homeowners from that period still own their homes; others have moved on. But they all share an experience of buying an upstate home that didn't turn their lives upside down, which is a foreign concept for most people buying since 2014 or so, and definitely since 2020, but prior to that, buying a home in the Catskills was as often a nightmare as it was a blessing, with undiagnosed home repair issues and a lack of liquidity if you ever wanted to sell.