Ranch 66, SOLD
Ranch 66 in Olivebridge also sold while I was away. This home is on 10 acres and once we started clearing the trees for the house and septic, it became apparent we were going to have a view of High Point in Ashokan, a mountain I’ve hiked several times.
Several of the properties had pretty good views which were not apparent when I started construction, and I think for the most part were not apparent even when I sold the lots. Pleasant surprise for everyone but of course you can’t help but wonder if you priced them too low, now that they have some pretty killer views.
The market is pretty interesting, and by interesting I mean tricky. I don’t follow other realtors sales close enough to know if things are sitting around or not and days on the market ticked up measurably, but from just the ‘feel’ of it, it seems like that’s the case. So, while there is always a twinge of ‘what if’ in a lot my sales, in the end, one the hand is worth two in the bush - and booking sales, even if not at tippy top sales, has always been my mantra, and I think its a good one to keep on following.
My lumber bill was $70k last month. I haven’t had a $70k lumber bill since, Idk when - maybe 2008? The previous month was $400k, which is tough on the cash flow fo sure. There’s all sorts of ways to gain insight metrics into business activity, some obvious some not so. The $400k was interesting because that was done when lumber and materials prices had stabilized, not back in pandemic days when things had tripled in cost - the $400k measure construction progress, since all progress is measured by an increase in cost of good sold, so to do that much construction in a month- holy cow. Pretty much not repeatable - but for a shining moment, we crushed it operationally.
That segues backwards about my team-building or lack of - it was clear with a person in that ordering/receiving/purchasing/returns seat - solely focused on it and not in the weeds with the clients - that’s a good structure if you are growing.
Ranch 66 turned out really nice. The clients - which I only have this one action photo - took some risks and they all really paid off. That green kitchen matching or complimenting the green board and batten accent wall, the amazing primary bath, the fun salvaged wall in the ground floor. This Ranch tops out at about 2600 sq ft, has some serious deck, and this one came with a fully conditioned - meaning heat, electric, insulation - studio framed by the mountain.
That’s the 5th sale out of 9. And if you know anything about development, you know about half way or more through you start actually getting past investment recoupment and start getting into profits, so there’s that.
Ranch 68 SOLD
Had a pretty good vacation, and also did a lot of monetizing and movement while I was gone. We closed on Ranch 68, closed on Ranch 66 and went into contract on a resale that the owners of 8 years were kind enough to let me list and sell. That's about $2.2m of transaction value while on the beach in the Riviera, if anyone is counting.
This house, even though it wasn't the first to close was the first to go into contract as a result of a food truck open house I had about a year ago. Was it only a year ago I hadn't sold a house there?- wow, hadn't thought of that way. Anyway, this young Ukranian handsome couple who had their first child while we were building the home, was the first the sign up. I often joke - at least I think he knows it's a joke - that here is was acting like a rookie home/land buyer, with his foreign naivety going up against and aged and veteran Catskills deal maker, and by moving first and having a good eye ended up getting the best deal in the project - literally picked my pocket!!! And picked a winner of a piece of land when it was pretty hard to decipher what was going where, etc.... My no problem - early movers, the ones that take on a little extra risk, usually get rewarded with better pricing. Same thing happened to me in St Pete's, where I was one of the first 15 buyers in a new downtown condo and got about a $200k first mover, developer needs sales, discount.
So good for them. I'll do a quick aside - you know what they didn't have while navigating the duty and work and stress of a pregnancy - they didn't have build drama. Sure we had our issues and problems to work through, which we did and now they are moving in. Pretty much on time and pretty much on budget - 2 things you don't encounter much in this business - plus a really fun and creative and tasteful home that will meet their needs for a long time to come.
If you zoom in you can see the baby with a huge smile.
A 2400 sq ft 3 bedroom Ranch on 7+ acres. The acreage we are able to offer up there is unheard of in this market. With land itself going for $250k+ for questionable quality, what we are doing up there in terms of the whole package pricing is simply not touchable for most of my competition. That's why I took the leap and did the subdivision, even though I knew the risks of time and money it would entail.
Beautiful home. Lovely clients. Another notch in our 24 year track record belt of designing, building, selling homes and pairing them with best in class pieces of land.
A brain is a funny thing to waste on over-focusing on problems and their requisite solutions instead of the glory of the sale and all the relationships - I guess the issue is the 'win' is static and defined, while the problems are fluid and evolving.
Back from france and back in the saddle
Ok, I was probably a little hard on American Airlines. In fact, I’m probably a little hard on everyone, but everyone’s hard on me, so what’s good for the goose….
I only mention the AA reevaluation since the flight home was so perfect, probably a mindset and reset after a fabulous time away as much as anything. I’m starting to get a glimpse of a lost personality that was just overwhelmed with work and responsibilities going on 4 years now. I guess ‘overwhelmed’ is the wrong word - being a word person - overwhelmed infers ultimately defeated, and that didn’t happen here. But I was fully employed to say the least, fully engaged, tested stressed and taxed every moment of every day for years. Starting to emerge from that test. I passed. But I was tested.
I saw something once, and then again recently, and it’s true. If you are a motherfucker who won’t quit - seriously won’t quit, just won’t do it- that’s a serious person as a friend or adversary. I’m that guy. I heard someone calling it ‘callousing your mind’, meaning you get used to doing things you don’t want to - be waking early, a Saturday or Sunday meeting, a late night, a long drive, a tough conversation and a hundred other examples - just as tradesman develops callouses that protects his hands, a calloused mind enables to you just get in there and get it done. Lots of softies out there - a hard working calloused mind is a serious thing.
Seven hours into an eight hour flight. Went pretty fast. I’ve been eating a lot of sweets, will have to tip the scales and see the damage done when I get back. If I could get back to Riviera next year too, that would be a win for sure.
Have to pick up the poor dog who’s been kenneled for 2 weeks and then on Friday drive to Penn State to watch my son’s QB varsity career get started with a 7x7 at one of the Penn State facilities on Friday. Got weekend client meetings, a baseball game on Sunday. Hitting the ground running but it’s in a decelerating fashion - if I’m doing a 1/3 of the business next year this time I’m doing now I’ll be surprised. My run is over and now the 24 year cash flow grind is settling and not being re-deployed immediately and rashly. Will be interesting to see what that looks like come December. The decision to hang it up, not to be putting up the most homes in the Hudson Valley at the greatest value for a large number of homeowners, didn’t come easy, but I tried for 16 months to build a team around me that could scale, and I failed. I tried, and we mixed it up a few different ways, and built some great homes and worked with some good people, but in the end, I got left continuing to do the heavy lift. In fact heavier, since now I had a more human resource bullshit to deal with. People! People have been the story of this whole journey of course - and the relationships therein have been amazing, but I'm not a natural people person, and especially not a natural under the stress and strain I put everyone around my under as we always push the boundaries of what is possible with enough strategic thinking and attention to peak efficiency.
I definitely see how the company I want to have should be organized, I just failed to find the people to do it with. Probably mostly my fault - I just didn’t have the ability to manage the intense nature of the operations, and the tedious nature of personnel management, at the same time- the techniques and methods for resolving each were too different and I was unable to summon the disparate hats needed to pull it off. I mentor, and have mentored, in life changing ways - dozens if not hundreds of people but the failure to build an office staff stemmed from the whiplash nature of people, their needs, idiosyncrasies, problems, quirks, talents, deficiencies, etc…. Just too much and the sand in the hour glass ran out before I got it figured out, got rested up and got recharged.
It’s fine. I couldn’t be more relieved. Feels good to decrease the RPM’s on our race car. Vrrromm, vrrrooom. Now I get to see how it feels to hop off the hamster wheel of building and selling, rinse and repeat. I guess the values of our existing homes go even higher with an even greater scarcity.
Above, the church steps I decided to sit on at 11:30pm on night and check in with 20 members, one by one, of the team - since it was 5:30, just after work back home. I didn't work a lot, but I did check in and I'm a morning checker-iner - so I had to refrain till mid-afternoon to check in for their morning. That was interesting.
Day 5, Nice
We sold two homes last week for $1.8+/1.9m free cash flow. Fun watching 26 months of work start to return on investment. The homes turned out great and more on that shortly.
Let me start by saying I’m no foodie. Not a connoisseur, not a kitchen person, never worked in a kitchen or restaurant and don’t have a discerning palette. So this won’t be about ‘the food’, which seems good to a layperson, and pretty recognizable, other than the Brazilian tapioca flour tortillas we had today. Seems like each civilization has a go-to cheap bread - the naan, the tortilla, american bread, Native American fry bread, the tapioca, etc… Seems like the Far East aren’t big bread eaters, settling in for the grains of rice.
And besides not being a foodie, I’m also only in one city (or several Riviera cities) so my perspective is limited to that of course. But what there aren’t are convenience stores on every corner selling junk food - chips, candy, licorice, doritos and all the other non-food we consume because it’s shoved in our faces all the time. There are plenty of fruit markets - small 200 sq ft stores of fruits and vegetables. Lots of bread and breakfast goods. Lots of coffee (though by the bag is harder to find than you’d think).
Soda, no problem. Fast food here in Nice is limited to one Burger King and one McDonalds, both busy. No Starbucks or dunkin’ - those goods are more local. Candy, at least the pre-packaged suite of M&M’s and related, harder to find and really, out of sight out of mind. Or inversely, in sight, in mind. I mean as a traveling man who puts 35k miles on my cars every year, I need to stop at my fair share of gas stations and convenience stores for coffee and gas and half the time to take a piss, but usually for the latter I’ll detour down a country lane to water a tree.
We are mostly eating in restaurants so I’m sure that comes with the basic issues of restaurant eating - butter, salt, and big portions - but eating at home seems to be a much more unprocessed experience, based on the goods that are easily found and purchased.
The argument that most of American eats shitty food, is served shitty food, is regulated into a shitty food box is hard to debate. The over-processed, highly marketed, low nutrition diet is hard to avoid.
I haven’t seen this much smoking since NYC circa 1999. A lot of smoking, so much so that I started taking pics of the ashtrays found during our ramblings for a coffee table book I’m going to label “Ashtrays of the Riviera’. Smoke, flick the butts, vape, etc....
Dogs run off leash - a lot of poop not picked up.
Lots of English on the coast of course, since even the French are self-spiteful enough not to cater to the english-speaking hordes that pass through. But just inland, like during our 10 miles electronic bike ride this morning, the ability rapidly decreases. I almost began to think the clichè of French people not speaking English was overblown. Also, perhaps the niceness, politeness and accommodation is reserved for the coastline as well.
A last thought on the electronic bikes - maybe not all electronic bikes are the same as the lime edition where each pedal is assisted. That would make more sense, since the bikes we are riding can hardly be termed bikes except for the fact that you are rotating your legs in a bicycle rotation. Even the 3000-5000 ft climb today from sea level to higher Nice elevation was powered by the electric of the beast. And there’s a job called juicers, and they are in charge - on a contractor basis of course - of recharging the bikes at night and redelivering them to an assigned location.
And I still can’t believe people have remote jobs where they are being monitored by their keystrokes and mouse movements. That is an existence that seems more from the industrial revolution belts of the Ford factory or meat-packing industry than college-educated persons.
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