Grey Zisser is Hudson Valley’s Certified DEN Build Partner and the founder of Upstate Build Company. After a first career in advertising, he proved his approach by building and renovating his own homes in the region. When an Airbnb guest asked if one of those houses was for sale—and then asked if he could build one just like it—Grey said yes. That commission launched a client practice focused on transparent budgeting, clear communication, and high-touch craftsmanship.

In this episode, Grey and Mike dig into what it really takes to build a DEN in the Hudson Valley and Catskills: from land search and feasibility (zoning, utilities, setbacks) to permits, scheduling, and inspections, all the way through punch list and CO. Grey explains his cost-plus process, how he uses 3D modeling to walk clients through choices in real time, and why having a boots-on-the-ground builder from day one removes friction, surprises, and costly rework.

If you’re considering a modern cabin, A-frame, or small home using DEN plans, this conversation is a practical playbook. You’ll learn how to set a realistic budget, where timelines get stuck, which decisions to make in design vs. on site, and how an experienced local partner can turn a set of plans into a finished, permitted home—on schedule and with fewer headaches.

1. Certified DEN Cabin Builder in the Hudson Valley — Design by DEN, Built by Grey Zisser

Mike: welcome everyone, to another episode of Dens podcast series where we interview folks who have built with Den, who wanna build with Den, partners of ours and everyone in between.

We are joined today by a new guest. I won't steal any of this thunder. But can't wait to get into this discussion, with our newest certified build partner in the Hudson Valley market. Gray, tell us a little bit about who you are.

Grey: Yeah. Hey, thanks for inviting me on. My company is the Upstate Build Company.

I am based in Acord, New York , close to Stone Ridge, Ulster County. And mostly work within Ulster County, but, , venture sort of all the counties around depending on what the job is, and what we end up getting excited about doing.

Mike: Awesome. So how long have you been at it for?

How long have you been a general contractor, helping to build homes and other projects in this area?

Grey: It's interesting. So I actually come from the advertising world , but I am a, architect School dropout.

Mike: Amazing.

Grey: Um, always passionate about architecture and design. Just couldn't hack it, you know?

And, uh, dropped out and got into sort of the advertising world. But always was renovating my houses. I built a couple of my own houses, always involved with it, and then I had friends start to ask me about helping them design houses or build and that sort of thing.

Then when COVID came around, we came up to our house up here, and I was just like, yeah, I think I'm done. I'm done with the city. I don't want to be in that game anymore. I managed several Airbnbs, and a guest actually said to me, 'oh, I love your Airbnb. Is it for sale? Are you interested in selling it?'

And I'm like, 'no, but I'll build you one'. And I just sort of threw it out there. And he was like, 'oh, really? Oh, that, yeah. Great.' And that's actually how I got introduced to DEN. We started looking online and then, he found you guys, cause he wanted an A-frame.

And, we took your A-frame plan and then developed it out from that. Ended up doing two A-frames joined together, which turned out really great. And since then, it's just been like, go, go, go, go.

Mike: Amazing. Amazing!

Grey: Word of mouth, basically, you know. So, yeah, it's pretty nice.

2. From Celebrity Home Renos to Modern Cabin Plans

Mike: Yeah, that's really cool. Also you're an architecture school dropout. I'm an architecture school, never was. It's great to align with folks and partners who have a eye for design, and an eye for aesthetics and craftsmanship and quality. I just like love this self-taught story, that you just shared with us.

Because everyone's gotta start somewhere, right? As I sit in the first cabin that I ever built. That actually was like the case study house for starting den.

But that's cool. So over the past couple years, can you share with us some like high level figures?

What does the business look like?

Grey: I purposely have been very hands-on, because I really wanted to understand every part of the build.

And get my hands dirty and cut off tips of my fingers and all the other stuff that happens in the industry. It really helped me put together, from my design into practical engineering, how you actually frame out a window and a door and... I mean, I just finished a year long project for, Steve Buscemi, which was a great project, started off as a kitchen renovation, but ended up opening up rotted walls, no foundation, hand digging out the foundation. 'cause he wanted to keep the roof as it was and... just learned so much. Just building new is somewhat easy because you've got your plan, you've got your schedule, you've got your materials, bam, bam, bam.

And it's kind of nice and clean, you know?

Mike: And another person's mistakes or decades worth of mistakes...

Grey: yeah. But, you know, doing the renovations has been really valuable for me because it's allowed me to see how you can manipulate or twist or find solutions.

And I do think that even building new. Even off a plan, there's always opportunity to tweak things, to change things, as opportunities arise and clients walk in...

I mean, for example, on the first one that I did, it was gonna be the, I don't remember which model... the bigger A-frame model with the mezzanine.

We started framing that all out and then the client walked in and he's like, 'oh I can't put the mezzanine in here. I wanna have the full height,' you know? So he said, ' but I want to have my bedroom in an A-frame, so can you do another smaller, a-frame next to this one?'

And, you have to work out how do you join two A-frames and putting in a shed roof in between and all those angles and, blowing out the side of the A-frames to like join in and that sort of stuff. I love it. It's exciting. And I think the biggest thing I've learned is about flow.

I call it flow. People's flow in a house is all personal. What rooms do they use? How much time do they spend in kitchen, bathrooms, all that sort of thing. How big should a hallway be? How big should the space between the counter and the island be? All of those little things I think makes it so interesting.

To really personalize, even though like you have amazing plans. But I still say to a client like, 'Hey, you know, we still can personalize this for you. This still needs to be your house at the end of the day.'

Mike: No doubt, no doubt. When we first started this business, we had this thought that our plans could stand alone, right? And that people would just buy them off the shelf, and execute them as design, because already it's like, each one of our designs contains like hundreds of hours worth of design thinking.

Grey: Yeah.

Mike: And I would say in like 95% of all cases, there's some amount of customization that happens to those plans.

Grey: Yeah.

Mike: And people can personalize, especially if you're about to spend like half million dollars on an asset and up, you're like, 'I really want this suit to fit correctly'.

I appreciate that. Today, like our platform definitely enables customizations. But that's definitely something that we've observed, very early on in the business.

Grey: Yeah.

Mike: So question for you. It sounds like you're pretty busy, across like new builds, renovations.

Grey: Yep.

Mike: How have you historically found your customers? What do you think is the key to setting up a client relationship for success?

3. Transparent Construction in the Hudson Valley: How Grey Builds Trust with Clients

Grey: Yeah. So pretty much all my clients up to date have been word of mouth.

I believe making a client happy is the best advertising you can ever have. So yeah, definitely word of mouth. Friends of friends, that sort of thing. People reaching out. And the one thing that I've experienced in the past, before I started the company and working with other builders was this sort of sneaky.. .

Well, I would say probably at least nine outta 10 builds, renovations or builds, end up with the client hating the builder and the builder hating the client.

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Grey: You know, because it gets to that last quarter, and the client just wants to get in and there's overages and now there's more money... and traditionally the building industry has been really bad with transparency.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. This is why DEN exists.

Grey: It's like, 'well how much is this gonna cost?' ' Well right now this is gonna cost about...', but you know, there's so many factors that go into a build. So I really wanted to start out with this transparency and I started out from the beginning with cost plus.

Mike: Yeah.

Grey: I decided, look, it's gonna cost you: my time, plus the materials, plus the handling fee, so that I choose the materials, make sure the right and all of that sort of thing. Also handling fee, young labor to make sure that all the liability insurances and all those things are in order so that you don't get sued, as a client.

Because people don't realize, like, yeah, if a worker hurts themself on a site, yes, they're gonna go through the subcontractor, subcontractor to the GC, GC to the owner of the property. They'll go all the way down the line and get money wherever they can. So it's making sure all of that's in line.

So, I really decided upfront, I wanna be transparent. Here's the receipts. This is what it is. The way I work is really, weekly or monthly, depending on how the client wants, we update invoice, ongoing invoice with update on time and materials, and really speaking to clients about helping them understand the process.

Mike: I think generally speaking, being a transparent and honest operator is always, always good practice. How do you help someone understand the impact of a decision?

Or how do you help someone understand the choice between two decisions, for something even as simple as like, 'do you want terracotta tile or do you want cement tile?' how do you guide those conversations, both early on, and mid-process?

Grey: Well, yeah, I always start off when people are like, 'well, how much is this gonna cost?'

And I'm like, ' tell me what door handles you want.' It always sort of makes 'em go like, 'what? What do you mean?' And I'm like, 'well, we can get a $10 door handle or we can get a $500 door handle. That's the difference, you know?' So when you're looking at a budget, you can go from a hundred thousand to 500,000 really easy because of your choice of materials.

So I like to -right in the beginning- create mood boards of what they're going for, what are the colors they're looking for, what are the design aspects they're looking for? All of those sorts of things and start getting them thinking about it.

I've been really proactive in researching materials and fixtures and fittings because as builders, if we only rely on what's available at Lowe's and Home Depot, i'm sorry, we're just gonna, we're all gonna build the same thing.

And it takes a lot of research to really dig in and find alternatives. So, I go to the Build Show every year. And I look at all the new materials and fixtures and fittings that are out there and discover that. I purchase a lot off things of Etsy, off Facebook marketplace.

Like I like to find one-offs or original things that you're not gonna see in the big box stores. So I really get the client excited in the beginning because I want them to be, but I want 'em to be excited all the way through about all those little details.

'cause you know, at the end of the day, they don't care about the framing. They never see the framing or the plumbing or the electrical, rough-in. They don't see any of that. It's the finish that they see. So, I try to get them involved with that right in the beginning, to get them excited about this is where we're going with that.

I use 3D modeling a lot. I would take your plans. , I use a software called House Pro. Which has been great. They've been developing, I've been working with them actually, with their software department, developing a lot of new stuff that's coming online now. So I can take your plans, I can put them into House Pro, and then I have a 3D model.

So I can walk clients through it and show them, well if we do a, 28 inch door or a 36 inch door or a 60 inch opening, how that feels and how that looks. And that's been super instrumental in getting clients on board and helping them understand.

I think communication is key.

Transparency and communication.

Mike: If you could imagine the emotional graph of a build,, I assume that people get pretty excited in the beginning. Having already interviewed multiple customers, I know for a fact that people get really, really excited after general framing is done.

Yeah. They're like, 'wow, I can actually like see it and like stand in the floor plan and like understand the space'. If it's sheathed even better, they could be like, 'wow, that's how tall the ceiling actually is'. What are some of the high points that you can think of? And then what do you think is like the lowest point of a project?

Grey: It's definitely a journey. I'll have clients come to me, in the case of Den, that may have looked at plans and they're like, excited about it and ' this is what we want and da, da, da', and then I have to go through the reality check of, 'okay, let's look at the infrastructure of where you're gonna build this and give the reality check of putting in electric and doing a well on septic' and all those things which nobody thinks about.

So at that point there's always a sort of... there's the excitement of doing it, and then there's the reality check, and then people tend to scramble a little bit and like, 'oh, I wasn't expecting that', you know.

No one expects the infrastructure of the land costs.

Mike: Right. Right. As a company, we spend a lot of time trying to educate our customers, right? In the cost calculator that we even have on our site, like we include line items for groundworks and things like that, but it's interesting 'cause like in this, everyone is like constantly concerned with this cost per square foot model, right? And most people actually don't know that cost per square foot excludes site fees. And I think that this is just an endemic kind of misunderstanding in the industry.

If you look at like a completely built asset for sale on Zillow people do kind of a back of napkin, like, 'oh, what's the cost per square foot for this built asset?' And it includes all of the land and the infrastructure cost, because it's just top level number on Zillow.

But when you're building something new, there's like these really important kind of buckets of expense. One of them being site fees, and infrastructure. And then the other being the construction of the house itself. And then I think thirdly, like the FFE, like the fixtures, finishes, and equipment!

Which sometimes are also excluded from a traditional comfort square. Typically, they're excluded from a cost per square foot model.

We've seen this too, the sticker shock that can occur during those really important inflection points in a project.

We try our hardest to coach people towards what to expect. But, yeah, there's nothing that will, prevent or transform the cost of putting a well in.

Grey: And if you go off the national average, it actually doesn't mean anything because maybe where you're at, they have to go, you know, 300, 400 feet and you're up to 15, 20 grand.

Mike: As someone who's experimented with like various business models on how to create a predictable business inside of selling housing, the one thing that's just impossible to solve for is the variability of site costs.

And to your point, you could maybe hit water inside of 200 feet, or you might have to double the length of the well drilling which is gonna incur costs. You won't know until you start.

Tell us what you do. Do you just put a larger provision in for some of those infrastructure costs?

Grey: Yeah, I like to get really up close and personal with my clients and really explain to them upfront, what they need to allow for. Because that is a bit of a down point, that reality check. And then when you finally get through that and you start scraping earth and putting in a foundation and framing, then it's exciting again.

I like to put cameras up so that they can log in from anywhere and watch the build from wherever they are and keep them excited about the progress. I like to do daily update reports of pitches and...

Mike: this is so cool that you're our partner.

I didn't realize that you have this...

Grey: hey look, I'm spending somebody's money and I think they deserve to know how it's being spent. And that's what I hated about the old system of building, 'it's gonna be 500,000', and then the guys aren't there, they're only there two days a week.

It's just that transparency and keeping them involved all the way through. I try to on a new build, have them come at least once a month, if not every couple of weeks.

Mike: Oh, wow. Cool.

Grey: To do walkthroughs. I think it's important to see the progress, to start thinking about everything, uh... finishes and imagining, you know, 'oh, well, maybe because you've got that view there, maybe it'd be better to have a window here, you know?' Thinking about landscaping, which no one ever thinks about. And they don't understand that when you scratch out a foundation, it's messy.

It's a messy site, you know? Uh, so I try to keep them excited the way through. So then, yeah, they get super excited with the framing, walking through, seeing the volume and all that sort of thing. And that's when things tend to drop because then you're doing all your rough ins and that's not interesting to anybody.

It's like, 'Hey, we did a plumbing rough in' 'Oh, great'. You know? It's all putting in all the structural things that make a house work. And that's when I start talking to people about finishes and fixtures and get them excited about... you have to distract them almost.

Yeah, because yeah, plumbing isn't fascinating. Electrical isn't fascinating, but again, sharing with clients like, ' if we put in the Lutron casita range, it means that you don't have to have three-way wiring everywhere'.

'Cause we can put a switch that can- you can control 50 lights off it if you want, and you can change it whenever you want.

So it's like being in a restaurant and like having a tasting menu. It keeps coming, keeps coming, keeps you excited, you know.

So really keeping them engaged all the way through, because it's the boring stage for clients, I think. You know, sheet rocking, it's just like tedious and boring.

Mike: Yeah. You know, I am a kind of nerd about all this stuff.

Obviously all of the trades are incredibly skilled in their own right. But the two,

Grey: yeah.

Mike: The two finishing trades that I'm most impressed with are people who are highly skilled with mud drywall mud, right? Finishing drywall, right? It feels like sculptural, right?

Like when done really, really well. And I'm super impressed by people who have the technique kind of like built in over like tens to hundreds of jobs. And then similarly tiling... for complex tile patterns. Like I'm just like, 'wow, this is like incredible'.

So in the cabin that I'm sitting in right now, those are the two things that I farmed out. Like I did a lot of the work myself here. Just to like do the same thing that you did, cut the tips of your fingers off and like learn third way. Right. But like, I definitely don't wanna fuck with like the drywall and the tiling and the tiler came in here with a laser level and, he was just incredible.

Incredible. What are your favorite tradespeople on a job?

Grey: Yeah, well, definitely drywall. Because I've had the opportunity to work with some quite high profile clients that have had budgets to do level five finishing. And that's something which I think a lot of people don't understand.

Like in sheet rock there are different levels of finish, and you pay accordingly. But when you actually study the process of sheet rock and traditional plaster work the way that it was originally done over lathes, you know, is that it? It was, the entire thing has to be plastered, right?

Not just joints, and to get a true, perfect finish, you have to coat the entire board with plaster. Yeah, several times. I had a project I was doing in London a few years ago. I had a 40 foot wall, windows, all the way around. So the sun basically followed all the way around, so it hit down the side of the wall.

And, I had those guys do it, and I'm like seeing these ripples and I'm like, 'no, no, no, I can't. No'. So then they're like, 'okay, yeah, yeah, we'll fix it. We'll fix it'. So they came in and it, it was a little bit better... And then I asked around, I ended up finding an Irish guy, like a six foot seven Irish, huge guy, hands the size of like plates. It was insane.

He came in and in one day watching him work was just like watching a ballet. It was just so beautiful the way he was able to manipulate this material.

Mike: I'm getting excited just thinking about it, it's crazy how, technique is so important!

It's hard to find those people!

Grey: And that's something which I really... I have examples now to show clients, 'look, this is a level three. And this is level five now. Level five's gonna be twice as much as level three'.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grey: 'Well, why is that?' So explaining to them that, it is about those finishes.

Particularly in, in high site areas that get a lot of sun on the side and that sort of thing. I mean, plumbing just fascinates me. I just love the ability... with the renovation jobs I've done, I've learned... I can put a bathroom anywhere. I can put a bathroom, like literally you can put a bathroom anywhere.

I've put bathrooms in basements, I've put bathrooms in attics, added them to bedrooms. I love that creative process of like, how can we disguise the plumbing? How do we get it, how do we get it up there through the walls?

I'm fanatical about like, uh...

I hate split units generally. But if you do do a split unit, I'm like, 'I don't wanna see, I don't want to see that stuff on the outside of the house'. It's gotta go through the wall. You know what I mean?

Mike: No one wants to snorkel on the side of their house.

Grey: You know, I'm just fanatical about those things.

'cause those are things that ruin a house, like cheap windows. There's little things that just ruin it, and I think are worth spending the time and the money when you're in framing stage to put in. And even thinking about, and one of the big things that I spent a lot of time on is really understanding the client's future needs.

So, especially up here, we get a lot of city people who are buying land and they wanna just do like a little weekend place, but as they get older, they end up moving up here. Or a young family. Or they don't have kids yet. A young couple, and then they start having a family and they need more space.

So thinking about as you're building and you're framing out, putting in, putting in headers where you don't even really need them because you know that; if this person they're thinking, yeah, down the road we might wanna expand, well that's where we're gonna do it because we already have a head of built in, i've terminated my plumbing and my electric at that point, so we can just extend it. Future proof. 'cause like going on a renovation and opening up a wall and seeing what someone else did 20, 30 years ago and not understanding it is a fricking nightmare.

Mike: Well, that is a really, really cool point. Well, Grey as a, as a former ad-man, we've got one last question for you; give us your best pitch. Give us your best welcome message to a prospective new customer.

4. Full-Service Hudson Valley Builder: Grey’s Welcome Message to New Clients

Grey: I'm Grey. I'm the Upstate Build company.

I like to take care of everything from beginning to end and help you oversee the entire project. 'cause I think everything from finding the right piece of land, you need to have your builder with you. They're gonna be able to tell you where you can build, what sort of foundation you're gonna need, what are those extra costs that come in the way.

So building that relationship from the very beginning through the design process. It's really important to understand what your spatial needs are, what your flow in the house is gonna be, and make those adjustments upfront as opposed to once your framing's already in. My key vision is like, transparency, communication, I'm your person with boots on the ground, who's gonna make it happen.

But I also want you to understand the process. I want you to understand where your money's going, how it's being spent, and what your options are, and understanding the difference between a $90 faucet and a $1,500 faucet. They both open and allow water through, how are we gonna play with that side of a budget to give you what you want?

Without going crazy.

Mike: Awesome, man. Well, thanks for spending some time with me today.