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The latest Trump legal woes comes once again from NY where a judge ordered his business dissolved for fraud. Nobody losts money and it came down to some misstatements. I haven’t read the full case, but the judge on a high profile part of the case is completely off. Not even ballpark off.
He valued Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. I texted a broker in the area and he told me 100 million for an ocean acre and 25 million for a non-ocean acres. Mar is between 17-20 acres depending where you look online. Palm Beach has gone up a lot since COVID so maybe divide those numbers by 2 since Trump made his filling. He listed the property at 450-650 million. Without doing a full underwriting (maybe zoning issues where it couldn’t be worth the raw land price) it still appears Mar is worth a lot of money.
If you are going to do lawfare shouldn’t you avoid obvious mistakes? It’s easy to see a headline and write this whole case off as political. It weakens public perception of all other cases if you make mistakes that are this stupid.
If I am remembering this case correctly he did likely violate the law and include some statement that were obviously false but in a category that no one besides Donald Trump gets prosecuted for. So the case of Mar-a-Lago violates a principle of maintaining plausible deniability.
Edit: @AshLael looked up the prosecutors brief and it appears they did not use the tax assessment for valuation purposes. Which would negate my main point. The judge has a history of making stuff up against real estate developers and being later reversed. It’s quite possible this judge hates developers and just does stupid things.
https://twitter.com/goodguyguaranty/status/1707232241925910944?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/mar-a-lago-judges-developer-hating-past-is-a-big-win-for-donald-trump/
Which would change the ruling and it’s citations to much more of all developer are bastards story (which is culture war) than my why are you lawfaring stupidly story
It is not correct to say the judge is the one valuing Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. The judge is just quoting the valuation from the Palm Beach County Assessor:
You can read the full ruling here. The ruling also goes over a bunch of properties Trump owned where he lied about easily verifiable facts to inflate valuations, like claiming his Trump Tower triplex was 30k sq ft when it was actually 11k sq ft.
Seriously, just skip down to page 20 and start reading. For property after property Trump was in possession of third party appraisals of his properties that he inflated to many times their actual value when reporting their worth to other parties.
Seven Springs:
So he inflated the value of his property by almost 10x what an appraiser said it was worth.
40 Wall Street:
Please tell me how it isn't fraud to lie to banks you're seeking a loan from and claim your assets are worth many times what they are actually appraised for.
Assessors for tax are notoriously different compared to actually FMV. Look at house sales and compare to assessment.
If Trump thought the assessors value was low the correct thing to do is hire an appraiser, get an actual value, and use that. As best the lawsuit seems to indicate Trump just made numbers up!
It’s commonly advised to not fight a low assessment because it reduces your property taxes. No one would assume a corrupt and/or ignorant judge would use that against him decades later.
True, but an independent appraisal isn't something that's going to be used as the basis to change the assessment. While their jobs are similar, assessors and appraisers don't look at exactly the same things, and an appraisal isn't even something the assessor's office will even know about.
Didn’t the Judge cite an assessor’s valuation?
Yes, because that's what's publicly available. An appraiser's valuation isn't public except for in unusual circumstances (like the property is subject to litigation, as in this case), and even then the values are almost always outdated by that point.
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They cited a tax value. That is not the same thing as an assessed value for market value. It’s a made up number they use for calculating taxes. And using it is an active attempt to deceive.
@coffee_enjoyer To be clear, an assessed value is one used for tax purposes. An appraised value is one used for market purposes, including determining collateral value.
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