Brady Huggett is a writer and journalist who grew up in Maine and lives in New York. This is the first of a three part series exploring the effects of the housing boom in Sullivan County in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

SULLIVAN COUNTY  — Justin McElroy was born in Westwood, NJ, but went to high school here in Sullivan County. He started his business, J-I-T Contracting, located in Callicoon, in 1999. These days he does custom building, from start to finish, sometimes even helping identify the land for purchase. 

His company went through the housing growth in Sullivan County following the attacks of 9/11 in lower Manhattan, when residents left the city and took up residence in the Western Catskills. And he survived the mortgage crisis of 2008 and the global recession that followed. But he had not experienced anything like what happened during the pandemic, when scores of people from New York City fled COVID-19 infection rates and the close quarters of the city.

“Our work tripled,” he said. “I’ve been in business 23 years, and I’ve never seen it that busy.” 

J-I-T Contracting was so stretched in 2021 he turned down 11 new builds; he simply didn’t have the manpower for that much work. 

The jobs he did take were for “a younger crowd,” he said — maybe 80 percent of his builds during the pandemic were people less than 40 years old. These were lawyers, people in marketing, and business executives, and when they were evaluating land plots, their first question was always “is there high-speed internet?” 

If not, they looked for something else. If so, the land could command up to a 30 percent premium for the sellers. 

These buyers also wanted more luxurious touches: a bigger office, a bigger kitchen, an expanded deck, maybe adding a pool. 

“We got a lot of that,” McElroy said.  

Like McElroy, Tom Freda, of Freda Real Estate in Callicoon, has seen just about everything. His father opened Freda Real Estate in 1971, and Tom Freda got his real estate license in 1982. He joined his father’s firm full-time in 1984, so he’s been selling Sullivan County homes for 40 years. 

He estimates Freda’s business was up 40 percent in 2020 and 2021, and his customers shared a lot of the same desires as McElroy’s. 

These people were “tech savvy,” and wanted a house connected to the internet, but they also wanted a place already renovated or spruced up. They didn’t particularly care about views or a spot along the Delaware; a private space with a “firepit in the backyard” was enough. 

Like McElroy, Freda’s clients tended to be younger than 40, and often had the buying power of dual incomes. 

It has been no different down river. Barry Becker is a real estate agent for Keller Williams Realty (Hudson Valley United). He is a New York City transplant: he and his husband bought a weekend home in Narrowsburg in 2001, but eventually left the city behind and now live here full time. The pandemic, and the exodus from New York City, exploded Becker’s business. His buyers, he said, were looking to move quickly, shaded younger than he’d seen in the past and sought internet-wired, turnkey places. 

“They didn’t want to go beyond painting,” he said. “They wanted to just move in and keep the process of life going.” 

When COVID-19 restrictions prohibited home tours in early 2020, Becker sold sixhouses without buyers ever setting foot inside, relying on a video tour and maybe driving by the property. 

It was busier still in 2021. Becker’s phone “would not stop ringing” last year, and he sold 56 homes, making him the No. 1 single agent in his agency. 

For certain the new residents of Sullivan County have changed the Western Catskills in ways that haven’t been fully calculated yet. But in other ways the pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already underway. Becker has watched the slow revitalization of the Western Catskills for two decades, but these days Sullivan County is “a focal point” for buyers, he said, “and our river corridor has become the target.”

Tom Freda agrees with that sentiment. The Western Catskills used to “play second fiddle” to the better-known vacation and weekend home spots for tourists or residents of New York City. Buyers would consider a place like Callicoon only if they were priced out of the quiet towns of Connecticut, or maybe the bustling Hamptons, where the median sales price for a home in the first quarter of 2020 was already nearing $1 million. 

But in recent years, Delaware river towns like Callicoon or Narrowsburg haven’t needed to make excuses anymore, and now “this is where [buyers] want to be,” Freda said. 

The data backs all this up. The census shows that from 2010 to 2020, Sullivan County’s population grew by about 1,100 people, up to 78,624. Yet it added an estimated 1,100 new residents just from the end of 2020 to midway through 2021, equaling the growth seen in the entire prior decade. 

The result has been a churning real estate market. There were 1,367 homes sold in 2021, a 33 percent increase over the number of homes that closed in pre-pandemic 2019, and prices have skyrocketed: the median sale price in 2021 of $245,000 was a 72 percent increase over the 2019 median. 

The fast growth, sheer numbers of new residents, and the relative wealth they have brought into the area have created new tensions.