[ad_1]
A Palm Beach real estate broker testified in a New York courtroom this week that former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, was worth $1.2 billion in 2021.
But another local real estate agent, Lisa Pulitzer, a third-generation Palm Beacher who works for local real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens, has told the Associated Press that Mar-a-Lago would sell on the low end for $300 million today.You can guess which one was called by Trump’s lawyers to testify in his fraud trial in New York.
Trump Estate and Club History
The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, has accused Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization of inflating asset values to gain favorable terms on loans and other financial benefits.
Lawrence Moens, the billion-dollar value claimer, said in a New York courtroom on Dec. 5 that kings, emperors, and heads of state with net worths in the multiples of billions were the kind of people who might be interested in buying Trump’s estate. It has never been up for sale since Trump acquired the 126-room, 62,500-square-foot mansion in 1985 for about $10 million.
Mar-a-Lago, which now has a private club, beach resort, and banquet hall, was built for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post between 1924 and 1927 and her second husband, financier E.F. Hutton. She gave the property its name — Spanish for “sea-to-lake” — because it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway.
Post willed the property to the National Park Service for state visits or as a Winter White House. The government, citing the maintenance costs, returned it to Post’s foundation in 1981.
Broker Moens had previously claimed that there might be “a dozen qualified buyers” for Mar-a-Lago.
“Were you thinking of a specific people?” Moens was asked in court Tuesday. “I always think of specific people,” he replied. When pressed to give the names of the people he was thinking about, Moens said: “I could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between.”
He added: “Kings, emperors, heads of state. But with net worths in the multiple of billions. I don’t know how many people have a net worth of more than $10 billion, but I think it’s quite a number. There are a lot.”
Judge Arthur Engoron has already found that Trump consistently exaggerated the value of his assets, pointing out that Trump’s estimate of the value of Mar-a-Lago was 2,300% times the Palm Beach County tax appraiser’s valuations, which ranged from $18 million to $37 million.
According to the Associated Press, the county gives Mar-a-Lago its current value for taxation based on its annual net operating income as a club and not on its resale value as a home or its reconstruction cost.
Making of a Private Club
In 1993, Palm Beach officials approved Trump’s plan to turn the estate into a private club. He built the ballroom but signed away development rights.
The agreement limits the club to 500 members. The initiation fee is $500,000, with annual dues of $20,000.
In his financial statements, Trump had valued Mar-a-Lago as high as $739 million — a figure James said ignored deed restrictions requiring the property to be used as a social club — not a private home.
After working as an editor on the foreign desk of the Washington Post (2001-2006), Richard Pretorius went out to explore the bigger world he had felt privileged to edit stories about. The first stop was Abu Dhabi and the launching of the National newspaper (2008-2013), then Hong Kong and the South China Morning Post (2013-2015) during a remarkable time of pro-democracy protests and 40,000 or so restaurants to choose from.
In 2015, he became a remote worker, editing stories for the London/Tunis based Arab Weekly (2015-2020). He was in Spain when COVID-19 clobbered Madrid in March/April 2020, and the newspaper shut down. He felt emotionally saved during those dark days of around-the-clock wailing ambulances and social distancing by the infectious spirit of the Spanish people and we-are-all-in-this-together nightly balcony shows.
He edited a book on the history of human rights groups in Iran, did a blog for an Aussie website focusing on the Biden-Trump 2020 presidential race, and said “yes” to just about any other freelance work.
In July 2021, he returned to the United States, working as an editor for Zenger News Service and then the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He joined Wealth of Geeks as a writer/editor in October 2023. Prior to catching the “international bug,” he had been the editorial page editor of three newspapers and a news editor/columnist in the Washington bureau of Scripps Howard.
[ad_2]
Source link
