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Notes -
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 worth reading this actual section of the ruling (which is not OCR'ed so I can't copy/paste from it), as well as articles like this.
First of all, the judge did not value Mar-a-lago at 17-25M. He cited the official Palm Beach County Assessor appraisal for the property, and did so accurately. This is indeed the value Trump was taxed on in Palm Beach for Mar-a-lago
Basically, Trump accepted huge land use restrictions on Mar-a-lago, basically meaning he could never develop it as anything other than a social club and could not subdivide it or sell off portions of it in any way, in exchange for the property taxes being assessed on an income-based model instead of the normal way.
The idea here is that these land use restrictions vastly decrease the productive value of Mar-a-lago as compared to other comparable real estate where you would immediately knock everything down and build high-priced condos for a huge profit. But when doing financial deals, he made up valuations that were in line with unrestricted land, like what you are talking about.
This is not actually true because if, for example, he staked Mar-a-lago as collateral for a loan and defaulted and a bank got the property, they would not be allowed to knock everything down and build a bunch of condos and sell them for half a billion dollars. They would be legally required to keep running it as a social club and earning income from its operation, which is (according to the palm beach assessor) more in line with what you'd expect for an enterprise worth $25M.
As always, reality has a surprising amount of detail, and you shouldn't believe everything you read in a tweet - even if it seems intuitively correct at first glance.
No this isn’t about “really has a surprising amount of detail”. I mean this is a complex valuation.
But the judge directly “only” states the 25 million value. Then says “an overvaluation of atleast 2,300% compared to assessors”
This is being willfully misleading. This feels like all the midtwits who try to emphasis the 50 intelligence agents who said hunters laptop was Russian (which he’s now suing them for accessing it) and then reply they gave a footnote that they actually knew nothing.
Nobody is debating that he’s NOT an allowed to subdivide it. And that does affect value but nowhere close to that value.
This is a case of what the news media does of them using a real piece of information in a misleading way. Most Americans don’t know tax appraisals and market appraisals are completely different and bear limited connection.
And I’ll be honest I think his 450-650 value was probably high back then. I could see it being worth 300 back then and he pumped it 50%. But the judge is lying in the document and basically created a press lease “Trump overstated 2300%” and that is not true. Average guy doesn’t know difference between a market appraisal and tax appraisal. Her conclusion is therefore lying.
That's funny because I didn't see Eric Trump, and of the right-wing outlets carrying his water, or the original post here mention it at all.
This is just a statement. Why do you believe that? I explained my reasoning, feel free to explain yours.
I’ve numerous times explained my reasoning.
That being side I worked it out with ashlael - the prosecutor didn’t even use that 25 value. The judge hates real estate values and frequently gets overturned. That part was the judge freelancing
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