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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.
According to the decision, signed a deed which restricted use of the property for anything other than a social club, including surrendering the right to subdivide the property and build homes thereon. Yet, in its filings, the Trump Organization submitted a valuation that ignored those land use restrictions, and claimed a valuation 2300% higher than the assessed value. And, the only evidence presented to the court to support the higher valuation was a conclusory affidavit from an expert, which, being conclusory, is of essentially no evidentiary value under established Florida law, and indeed established law pretty much everywhere.
So, what basis do you have for saying that only a corrupt or ignorant judge would reach the conclusion he did?
If beach front property assessments in Florida are anything like farmland assessments in the Midwest, such a valuation might not be completely ridiculous. Around me, pretty much all farmland is assessed at $1,500–$2,000 per acre, even though land hasn’t sold for that since the 1990s. One large farm near me recently sold for $20,000 an acre, but the assessed value is only $1,931 an acre. No farmer would (or should) get in trouble for valuing his land at 2023 rates, no matter what the assessor thinks. I’m not saying Trump’s properties are definitely the same, but it doesn’t seem immediately ridiculous to assume they might be.
Ok, but did the Trumps produce evidence that properties in the area often sell for 10x their assessed value? And you are ignoring the reference to the claimed value ignoring the restrictions on development. That is pretty bad, if true.
Regardless, remember the point is not that the judge is correct; it is that the claim that his decision can only be the result of corruption or ignorance does not seem to be consistent with the facts.
On the Palm Beach property I’m knowledgeable to yes the result is corruption or ignorance or just trying to give the redditors a partisan talking point. There isn’t even plausible deniability here.
Even if Trump can’t subdivide it’s certainly worth more than sfh with 2 ocean front acres which are trading 200 million plus. The family buying that plot would buy Mar for 200 and just have 15 extra acres.
You might not be able to get the full value of 20 acres which is probably over a billion but it’s certainly worth more than the highest sfh in the neighborhood which gives a lower bound of probably 250 million.
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