October 12, 2012 – the day I saw Kindred Spirit
I first entered the Real Estate business in 2002 after I sustained injuries in a motorcycle crash while running my Excavation Company in New York. I was what they call an Owner/Operator. The injuries sidelined me for quite a while and I could not afford to keep a bunch of very expensive Excavation Equipment in storage while I waited for my injuries to heal so I had to sell it all off. As an entrepreneur since the age of 10, sitting home and letting bones grow was not something I could handle. I’ve been on the go for over 20 years at this point. An opportunity to join a Real Estate company came up and I jumped on it – literally! I went down to Manhattan and within a few weeks, I had completed Real Estate School and passed the state exam. I was a licensed Real Estate agent. Within a few years, I climbed up out of the trenches and started my own Real Estate Brokerage. It was 2005, yep the year the market began to collapse. By 2006, people were fleeing their homes and the Real Estate business was all but bust. But not for me, I somehow managed to carve out a nice little niche business and my sales were growing. In addition to my Real Estate office, I began a Property Management Company and a Handyman Company. The three businesses worked hand in hand. It was seamless, but all independent. By 2011, I was what some would call a success. I was ranked in the top ten percent in a highly competitive market. I had expanded my market from New York into Connecticut and life was great.
Showing homes along the water in Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut as well as Mamaroneck, New York reignited an itch I had from way back in 1999. Twice a day I would be taking the train down and then back up the Hudson River as I commuted to work in Manhattan. While others read the paper or slept or worked on their Palm Pilots (who remembers those) I would sit with my nose to the window and look out at the boats on the Hudson. I dreamt of what it would be like to sail off to far away places. This wasn’t a passing dream, but one that would shape the rest of my life eventually. I took sailing lessons, began searching for a boat I could both sail and live on full time. I subscribed to numerous sailing magazines. I eventually traded working in Manhattan for working in a Backhoe, but the dream remained.
In 2005 I was ponding the pavement growing my real estate business. I had been watching people flipping homes for a few years now. Some would never even move in and would simply just buy a house and put it back up for sale and make an extra $50k – without doing a single thing but wait a few months. Others, with no actually construction skills, would put in a new kitchen or bathroom and walk away with an extra $100k. I now had enough money to buy my boat, but seeing how these people were making so much, I had a thought; if I purchased a house instead of a boat – something everyone around me said was just a “big hole in the water you throw money into”, I would have even more money in a year. Imagine how much I would have in three years! So after heading the advice of others, I jumped into the housing market myself. BOOM!
In the forty years I had been alive, no one ever saw home prices sink as low as they did in one year. By year two of home ownership, I had lost any equity I had in my house and it was dropping like a stone. By year three, I had lost 33% of the value on my house and there was no end in sight. I watched $130 thousand dollars disappear in just three years. I could not have lost that much in a sailboat if it had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The only bright side was that my Real Estate, Property Management and Handyman Business was actually doing well, but the dream of owning a boat – Sank.
Now here I was, It’s 2011, I had survived the housing collapse, though I had long since sold the home at a tremendous loss. My Real Estate business is booming and I am working again along the water. This time, the Long Island Sound. I’m spending weekends at the beach on Fire Island and life is good. Then that little itch returns. Between New York and and all of New England, there are only a few places that allow year-round liveaboards. In New York, it’s the 79th Street Boat Basin and there is a waiting list a mile long there – as well as it being expensive. In New England, there are only a few Marians that remain operational throughout the winter with the most famous one being in Boston Massachusetts. So having not one, but two marinas in Stamford, Connecticut could be the ticket to that dream and I already had clientele in the area. After some deep thought, I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to move my office from New York to Stamford Connecticut and focus on expanding up the Connecticut coastline.
There were two ways to go about this new direction. One was to open a third office (I had another in upstate New York) and the other was to sell the New York office and move everything to Connecticut. The summer of 2012 I chose the second option, but how does one go about selling off a Real Estate & Property Management Business? Well that happened quite by accident. See, I was leasing my office so the value was in my clientele and good will and not in actual real estate holdings. However, with my Property Management business, I was ankle deep in the commercial market and it was from there that I had learned of the value in a lease. In fact leases are often bought and sold. So I renewed my lease for 5 years and put it up for sale. With that on the market, I started trying to figure out where to market the New York Property Management. Then one day I am walking out of Home Depot and parked right next to me is a van with a company name and Property Management on it. I wrote down the name and researched the company. Three weeks later we had a deal and by February 2013, my New York properties would be taken over by this company. Now it was back to the Real Estate office. I was having trouble selling that and as time went on, I thought it would be a lost cause, but I persisted.
Meanwhile, I had picked out a Marina and I was spending all my free time boat shopping up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Maryland. It was on this chilly October day in 2012 when I came across Kindred Spirit. She wasn’t the best yacht I had seen and had been drastically modified. She was a 1987 Morgan 43 Center Cockpit. The owner added a Hard Top Bimini, a Sugar Scoop Transom and modified the aft stateroom to a Centerline berth. For some reason, it spoke to me and I pursued it. It was the first yacht I ever put a deposit down on and the first time I began the buying process. Having been in Real Estate for all these years, I understood how negotiations worked and I tried hard to follow the guidelines that had made me a success in Real Estate.
While negotiations began on the yacht, negotiations were also begining on my office space and a deal was struck. I’d be vacating my office in January of 2013. With Kindred Spirit now out of the water, I would have to wait until Spring before I could get her Surveyed and do a test sail. It was then that I decided to move to Vermont and await the arrival of Spring and the launching of Kindred Spirit.
When January arrived, I rented an office in Stamford Connecticut near where I’d be keeping the boat and moved to my families vacation home in Vermont. By Spring the boat deal had fallen apart, the owner ended up taking it to Florida to sell down there and I was stuck in Vermont.
I’m not sure what ever became of Kindred Spirit. I have since learned that what the owner had done to her would have drastically affected the way she would have sailed. Not only with the Sugar Scoop transom, but the way he changed the interior and the hard top Bimini, would have also affected its sailing characteristics. With all the hurricanes that have since hit Florida, I can only imagine the worst for Kindred Spirit. I will forever remember that boat as it was the reason I got into kayaking. See the picture, I saw those kayaks and though they were not included in the sale, it prompted me to look into kayaking – after all, I was not just stuck in Vermont, I was stuck on a beautiful lake in Vermont.
That boat, though never acquired, changed the direction of my life more than anything that occurred prior to it. I ended up selling the rest of my real estate company in Connecticut and eventual sold off my small manufacturing business. Since then, I have been sailing the country on two and four wheel and there even was a stint where I kayaked from Canada to the mouth of the Delaware River. I might be without a sailboat, but I have been sailing never the less and Vermont, I still consider it my home and yes, I still dream of living on a sailboat and sailing to far off lands.
Here’s to you Kindred Spirit, wherever you may be.
