by In the real estate world, Donald J. Trump’s name has long been synonymous with luxury. In one of his buildings in Manhattan, a five-story waterfall slides down a wall of Breccia Perniche marble. White-gloved doormen, cascading chandeliers and panoramic views of the city skyline are the hallmarks of another.
It is that image of luxury, which he turned into a brand, that the former president presented as a rebuttal to the recent lawsuit that he lost on Friday after a judge determined that Trump fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate properties, ordering him to pay a fine that will exceed the 450 million dollars.
“My client is worth hundreds and hundreds of millions,” one of Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, said during closing arguments in the trial, adding, “not to mention the brand, which is worth billions.”
But up and down the spine of Manhattan, condos in high-rise buildings emblazoned with Trump’s name have underperformed, according to sales data from two real estate tracking firms and an analysis of the data. by Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.
The line in the sand is the year 2016, when Trump was elected president.
In a span of one year, condos in buildings with the Trump logo went from selling for a 1 percent premium over similar units to selling for 4 percent less, meaning Trump condos They became a “bargain” among the city’s luxury units. said Mr. Van Nieuwerburgh, a real estate professor.
Even Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, one of the Trump brand’s crowning achievements, whose 80-foot waterfall flowing down a peach-colored marble wall was supposedly built from slabs carefully selected at a quarry in Italy by Trump’s ex-wife. Trump saw the average price per square foot of his condos drop 49 percent since 2013, according to Ondel Hylton, senior director of content and research at CityRealty. The building’s age, growing competition from ultra-luxury condominiums on nearby Billionaires’ Row and regular protests have dampened interest, Hylton said.
By contrast, condos in four buildings where the Trump logo was removed at the behest of residents, sometimes after a legal battle, have seen their values soar again.
“This analysis clearly identifies that it is the Trump brand that is responsible for the deterioration in value,” Van Nieuwerburgh said. “Removing Trump’s name from the building eliminates the loss associated with the name.”
A review of the price per square foot of condos in the seven Manhattan buildings that still bear Trump’s name found that the value fell 23 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to CityRealty, a real estate listings website. An analysis using a slightly different methodology by ATTOM, a real estate data analytics company, showed the drop was 17 percent.
By contrast, the four buildings that removed the gold Trump logo finished the decade from 2013 to 2023 up 9 percent, outpacing the Manhattan condo market, which rose 8 percent over the same period, according to City Realty.
Van Nieuwerburgh started with the same data, then reviewed the sales figures, making sure to compare apples to apples: For example, a three-bedroom condo in a Trump doorman building on the Upper West Side was compared. to a three-bedroom unit in the same neighborhood in a building that also had a doorman.
He found that Trump-branded buildings have collapsed in value by 25 percent compared to similar properties since their peak in 2013. “It’s huge,” he said.
The data that was analyzed is exclusively for Manhattan. The Trump brand may be doing better in parts of the country where the former president’s politics are more aligned with most voters, including Florida, where his Mar-a-Lago resort is located, as well as numerous towers in Sunny Isles Beach and Hollywood, Florida, which are adorned with his name.
In an email, Eric Trump, the former president’s son and de facto CEO of the Trump Organization, questioned the analysis.
“The data can be manipulated to tell any story you want, but the fact is that our buildings sell for the highest prices per square foot of any property in the world. That is undeniable,” she wrote. “This year alone, Trump International Hotel & Tower New York closed on a $17 million unit, out-pricing Time Warner, Essex House and the city’s most prestigious properties.”
But the $17 million condo sale at 1 Central Park West, also known as Trump International Hotel, is a far cry from the city’s best-selling condos, which included a $52 million sale for a West Village penthouse . Trump’s condo sold for more than $4,600 per square foot; the penthouse sold for more than $11,400 per square foot, according to CityRealty.
A review of the top 100 sales in 2023 found that the top-selling condo in a Trump-branded building ranked No. 47 on the list, while the second-best-selling unit ranked No. 77, CityRealty found.
“I just did the math in the last half hour and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it,” said Hylton, senior director of content and research at CityRealty, who expressed surprise at the value of Trump-branded condos. he had lost.
Definition of “more expensive”
Even Trump’s critics say he deserves credit for the way he has leveraged family wealth, boldly expanding his father’s empire from a portfolio that included thousands of mostly working-class apartments in the outer boroughs to the heartland. from Manhattan.
In the 1970s, when even the Chrysler Building was in foreclosure, Trump purchased the former Commodore Hotel, converting it into a shiny Grand Hyatt, which in turn revitalized an area that was considered blighted at the time. Trump opted for location: located next to Grand Central Station, the hotel was at the mouth of one of the city’s main arteries, the point where travelers from the luxury suburbs arrived.
“It was genius,” said Barbara Corcoran, who sold her real estate company for an estimated $70 million in 2001 and is now a “Shark Tank” judge. “Forty-second Street was a street you couldn’t walk on.”
The transformation was palpable.
“It totally rewrote the way people look at life in New York,” Corcoran said.
Other deals followed, but Trump’s calculations were often based more on marketing than facts.
Ms. Corcoran, who was in her 30s and a newcomer to real estate when she launched her eponymous “Corcoran Report” in 1981. Written on her typewriter and copied on a photocopy machine, the report ranked the best-selling properties in the city. Four years later, when she released her “Top Ten Condos Report,” she discovered that Trump’s claim that her condos in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue were the most expensive in the world was wrong. (The future president’s apartments appeared on his list, she said, but not at the top.)
Before publishing his press release, he arranged a meeting so he could respond to his findings. Nervous, she couldn’t sleep the night before and showed up at his office in a power suit, he said.
The meeting did not go well. Trump opposed his methodology. At the event, Corcoran said, he proposed a solution: If he recalculated the value of Trump’s condos based on the price per room, or price per square foot, instead of the overall sales price, he would come out ahead. above. The rooms in his building were small and therefore more expensive, he said.
“I didn’t want to become an enemy of that man,” she said. “I was a young runner.”
In the late 1980s, Trump’s newspaper ads cited the Corcoran report as evidence that his units were the most expensive in the city.
But Trump ran into financial and legal challenges, and his companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. at least six times In the 1990s and 2000s. While recovering from financial failure, he came up with something new: He began renting out his name for a fee, which appeared on buildings he had not built, and only some of which his company managed.
The move, ahead of its time, reversed and upended the usual real estate formula, which stipulates that location plus floor plan equals value, said one longtime Manhattan developer. Now, there was a location, a floor plan and, too, a brand: the Trump name, which had an aspirational quality, said the developer, one of three major Manhattan developers who spoke about the Trump brand, all of whom requested anonymity out of fear. to retaliation.
‘Ashamed’
In 2012, Linda Gottlieb, producer of the movie “Dirty Dancing,” didn’t think much about having to walk under a Trump sign every time she entered her building. His skyscraper at 160 Riverside Boulevard was part of “Trump Place,” a group of six towers (three of them rentals and three condominiums) that stretched for several blocks overlooking the Hudson River at 120, 140, 160 , 180. , 200 and 220 Riverside Boulevard.
In some of the buildings, everything from doormats to staff uniforms was marked with Trump’s name.
But as the 2016 presidential election approached and crude comments Trump had made about women and immigrants dominated the news cycle, Gottlieb felt ashamed.
“I felt embarrassed,” she said, describing how she felt when she passed the maintenance staff born outside the United States. “Every time she looked at them, she thought: How can they be working in a building like that and how can I not try to do something about it?”
He helped draft a petition to remove Trump’s name from the building, slipping it under the doors of the more than 450 units. By fall 2016, three of the buildings, all of them rentals, had removed Trump’s name and vetted staff members for new uniforms. Condo buildings, including the one in legal dispute, removed the name in 2018 and 2019.
Today, Gottlieb returns to a building that has a sign that says 1-6-0, his address on Riverside Boulevard.
“Now I enjoy the view of the river when I come home,” he said, “and I think it’s very nice to be in a building with just a boring number.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Carlos V. Bagli contributed reporting from New York. Susan C. Playaro and kitty bennett contributed to the research.
