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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Is Trump actually always innocent?

From the Laetita James suit I have to come to the conclusion that he is in fact always innocent. Reddit lefties are salivating that they’ve finally caught their guy. I see three main issues at play:

  1. He likely has some personal guarantees on loans and that’s why he has to submit net worth documents to banks. He was aggressive on some valuations but valuations are subjective. Banks have underwriters for this stuff. And real estate developers always have lofty views on their property valuations. These properties he has loans against the banks would have first underwrote them at the property level before considering a personal guarantee.

  2. Discrepancies between say property tax valuations and what he submitted. These always differ on everyone’s property.

  3. He donated some property for conservation. She’s saying the property had some issues and the value should be lower. His total tax savings were 3.5 million. Assuming 40% federal rates and 10% New York that means he saved 700k in NY. If the properties worth less then maybe he owes NY a couple hundred thousand. This is something you deal with in an audit not a civil case or criminal case.

I can’t comment on the FBI raid as I don’t know anything about what’s normal with classified information. I do know the tax code, accounting, real estate development, banking. And this is just a loud press conference and book report for something that just sounds like an audit.

Also no victims who lost money at any of the banks he did business with. Art of course is a whole legalized fraud of donating after making your art look really valuable. JB pritzker legendarily removed toilets from his house to make it “uninhabitable” and lower his property tax bill. This just breaks down to tax law is complex and people play games to lower their taxes.

I mean, just to take the most straightforward fraud he committed, he deliberately lied about the size of his triplex apartment, inflating its square footage by 3x. Trump claimed it was over 30k square feet (and valued it accordingly) when it was only 11k square feet. Between 2011 and 2012 the reported value of the apartment increased from $80M to $180M due to the fraudulent square footage reports. Then, after Forbes wrote an article about Trump lying about the apartment's size, the valuation dropped to accord with its actual square footage. Between 2016 and 2017 Trump's reported valuation of the apartment dropped from $327M to $116M. Is it being "aggressive" on a valuation to lie about the square footage of the asset being valued by 3x?

Is it being "aggressive" on a valuation to lie about the square footage of the asset being valued by 3x?

I genuinely don't know, was/is this common practice in the NY property market? How did he measure it? Does it depend where you start your measurement, and he started it in one place and the assessor started it in another?

This is nothing but a feeling, but I do think landlords/property rental companies kinda sorta maybe routinely inflate their estimation of square footage of domestic properties to attract potential tenants. I highly doubt Trump himself was going around with a tape measure checking the actual footage.

The question at the center of many of these cases is whether or not there is an acceptable gap between represented and actual square footage. Often, different methods of measurements are used to calculate square footage, which is why parties can disagree as to which is the accurate tally. Liability may depend on the jurisdiction in which your property is located, as well as prior case decisions.

Court case about same sort of dispute:

NEW YORK — Four years ago, Rishi Bhandari and his fiancée put down a deposit on Apartment 3T at 110 Livingston St., the old Board of Education headquarters in downtown Brooklyn that was being converted to condominiums. The price was $795,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment.

Just before they were to close, Bhandari noticed that the living space seemed smaller than he had expected. He returned with a measuring tape, he said, and confirmed his suspicions: The bedrooms, living room and kitchen area covered only 634 square feet, even though the floor plans said they had 743.

Most people view square-foot calculations with the same trust they put in mileage-per-gallon stickers and the weight-loss claims of diet pills. But Bhandari, a lawyer, wanted the price of his apartment reduced by the size of the discrepancy, what an appraiser calculated to be about $111,000. The developer refused, offering to return his deposit, $79,500, plus interest, and to let him walk away.

Bhandari sued, claiming the plans were deceptive. Real-estate lawyers say it is rare for such disputes to go to trial, but Monday, that is what will happen when the case of the missing 109 square feet begins in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Not just in NYC, either:

One of the best advice I've seen on this board is to bring a tape measure to the open house. We've been looking at apartments in DOBRO, Williamsburg, LIC and Manhattan and the discrepancy in square footage goes from small to fraud. It's ridiculous that an apartment can be listed 25% larger than it really is when the price is so intertwined with square footage. I've noticed especially with new development there is this size inflation. We should list particularly egregious examples of size inflation. Buyer beware indeed.

So was Trump naughty naughty? Very likely. Was he the only one at it? Not at all.

Why would he do it, though? What’s the gain? If someone were to buy an apartment from him, he’d notice that it’s a third of its advertised size, so no buyer would ever be defrauded. Similarly, higher valuation means higher property taxes, so overstating value of his apartment is a loss for him. Seriously, why would he do that? What for?

I think the idea is that he could use that inflated valuation as leverage for loans that he otherwise would not have been able to get.

But nobody’s claiming he wasn’t paying back those loans. He’s basically inflating his credit score and then making money for those lenders?

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