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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
The most objective misrepresentation would be the size of his triplex penthouse: is it 30k ft² or 11k ft²? The dispute starts with this Forbes article, which tells us that Trump occupies the top three floors along with his sole neighbor who has 3,368 ft². Trump had been claiming 33k or 30k ft², but the city records show only 10,996. This does seem like a large discrepancy, and the author doesn't have an explanation other than perhaps a large amount of mechanical space.
When looking at the details of Trump Tower, the floors are numbered, but not by how many floors there are. When you go up one floor from the 5th, you arrive at the 14th floor.
From a typical floor plan in Trump Tower, we can calculate that each residential floor is about 11k ft² (not including the large central square for elevators and stairs). If Trump owned the top three floors, this would nicely match his claim of 33k ft². From the 1983 declaration, the sum of the units on a typical floor is 10,089 ft². For the top three floors, there is a 2,764 ft² duplex, and two triplexes summing to 11,195 ft². This leaves at least 16,308 ft² unaccounted for on these top three floors.
If the triplex had large atriums, that could explain some of the missing floor space, but all the pictures I found showed normal-height (elaborately decorated) ceilings.
Most high-rise buildings have mechanical floors for HVAC, water pumps/tanks, etc. Trump Tower doesn't appear to have any dedicated mechanical floors, other than the roof above the 68th. Instead, there are mechanical rooms on the 16th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 66th, 67th, and 68th floors. When calculating "Usable Square Feet" for a full-floor tenant, these mechanical rooms are included. This gets us close to the claimed 30k ft².
So perhaps it's possible that two reported floor sizes, differing by a factor of three, are both accurate.
This is a remarkable level of theorycrafting for a situation where Trump has already made his own actual defence arguments and they bore no resemblance to this.
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I don’t disagree the Penthouse appears to be wrong and misrepresented.
But I think you are arguing his numbers could be right. Maybe. Does seem weird to say 3x but so maybe they had argument for that.
You are making me curious how these ever got released. Banks wouldn’t give out client info like this unless they were suing.
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