In the world of real estate, the name of Donald J. Trump has long been synonymous with luxury. In one of his buildings in Manhattan, a five-story waterfall slides down a wall of Breccia Perniche marble. White-gloved porters, cascading chandeliers and panoramic views of the city skyline are the hallmarks of another.
It is this image of luxury, which he has turned into a brand, that the former president launched in rebuttal in a recent lawsuit that he lost on Friday after a judge found that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated the value of his properties, ordering him to pay a penalty that will exceed $450 million.
“My client is worth hundreds and hundreds of millions,” one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Haba, said during the final arguments in the trial, adding, “let alone the brand, which is worth billions.”
But up and down the spine of Manhattan, condominiums in high-rise buildings bearing Mr. Trump’s name underperformed, according to sales figures from two real estate tracking firms and an analysis of the data by economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia University.
The line in the sand is the year 2016, when Mr. Trump was elected president.
Over a one-year period, condos in buildings bearing the Trump logo went from selling for a 1 percent premium over similar units to selling for 4 percent less, meaning Trump condos became a “bargain” between of the city’s luxury units. said Mr. Van Nieuwerburgh, professor of real estate.
Even Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, one of the crowning achievements of the Trump brand, whose 80-foot waterfall flows down a wall of peach marble was reportedly built with slabs hand-selected at a quarry in Italy by former wife of Mr. Trump, has seen the average price per square foot of its condominiums drop 49 percent since 2013, according to Ondel Hylton, senior director of content and research at CityRealty. The building’s age, increasing competition from ultra-luxury condos on nearby billionaires’ row and regular protests have limited interest, Mr. Hylton said.
By contrast, condominiums in four buildings where the Trump logo was removed at the behest of residents — sometimes after litigation — have seen their values rise again.
“This analysis clearly identifies the Trump brand as the one responsible for the degradation,” Mr Van Nieuwerburgh said. “Removing the Trump name from the building removes the loss associated with the name.”
A review of the price per square foot of condominiums in the seven buildings in Manhattan that still bear the Trump name found that value fell 23 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to CityRealty, a real estate listings website. An analysis using a slightly different methodology by ATTOM, a property data analytics firm, showed the decline was 17 percent.
In contrast, the four buildings that removed the gold-toned Trump logo closed the decade from 2013 to 2023 with a 9 percent increase, outpacing Manhattan’s condominium market, which grew 8 percent over the same time period, according to City Realty .
Mr. Van Nieuwerburgh started with the same data, then combed through sales figures, making sure to compare apples to apples: for example, a three-bedroom apartment in a concierge-serviced Trump building on the Upper West Side. in a three-bedroom unit in the same neighborhood in a building that also had a doorman.
He found that Trump-branded buildings have collapsed in value by 25 percent compared to similar properties since their peak in 2013. “It’s huge,” he said.
The data analyzed is exclusive to Manhattan. Mr. Trump’s brand is likely to do better in parts of the country where the former president’s policies are more in line with the majority of voters, including Florida, where his Mar-a-Lago resort is located, as well as many towers in Sunny Isles Beach and Hollywood, Florida, bearing his name.
In an email, Eric Trump, the former president’s son and the de facto CEO of the Trump Organization, disputed the analyses.
“Data can be manipulated to tell any story you want, but the fact remains that our buildings sell for the highest prices per square foot of any property in the world. This is undeniable,” he wrote. “This year alone, the Trump International Hotel & Tower New York closed on a $17 million unit, outbidding Time Warner, Essex House and the city’s most prestigious properties.”
But the $17 million condo sale at 1 Central Park West, also known as the Trump International Hotel, is far from the best-selling condos in the city, which included a $52 million sale for a West Village penthouse. The Trump condo sold for over $4,600 per square foot. the penthouse sold for more than $11,400 per square foot, according to CityRealty.
A review of the top 100 sales in 2023 found that the top-selling condo in a Trump-branded building took No. 47 on the list, while the second-best-selling unit came in at No. 77, CityRealty found.
“I’ve just been crunching the numbers for the last half hour and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it,” said Mr. Hylton, CityRealty’s senior director of content and research, who expressed surprise at the value of Trump-branded apartments he had lost.
Definition of “Most Expensive”
Even Mr Trump’s critics say he deserves credit for the way he has taken advantage of the family wealth, boldly expanding his father’s empire from a portfolio that included thousands of mostly working-class apartments in the outer boroughs in the heart of Manhattan .
In the 1970s, when even the Chrysler Building was in foreclosure, Mr. Trump bought the old Commodore Hotel, turning it into a glitzy Grand Hyatt, which in turn revitalized an area considered blighted at the time. Mr. Trump gambled on the location — located next to Grand Central Station, the hotel was at the mouth of one of the city’s main arteries, the point where commuters from upscale suburbs arrived.
“It was smart,” said Barbara Corcoran, who sold her real estate company for about $70 million in 2001 and is now a judge on “Shark Tank.” “Forty-second Street was a street you couldn’t walk on.”
The transformation was palpable.
“He completely wrote the way people see life in New York,” Ms. Corcoran said.
Other deals followed, but Mr. Trump’s calculations were often rooted more in marketing than reality.
Mrs. Corcoran, who was in her 30s and new to real estate when she released her eponymous “Corcoran Report” in 1981. Written on her typewriter and copied on a Xerox machine, the report ranked the best-selling properties in the city . Four years later, when she released her “Top Ten Condominiums Report,” she discovered that Mr. Trump’s claim that the Trump Tower apartments on Fifth Avenue were the most expensive in the world was wrong. (The future president’s apartments appeared on her list, she said, just not at the top.)
Before publishing her news release, she held a meeting so she could respond to her findings. Nervous, he couldn’t sleep the night before and showed up at his office in an electric suit, he said.
The meeting did not go well. Mr Trump objected to its methodology. On the spot, Ms. Corcoran said, she proposed a solution: If she recalculated the value of Mr. Trump’s apartments based on price per room or price per square foot rather than the total sale price, she would be fine. The rooms in his building were small and therefore more expensive, he said.
“I didn’t want to make an enemy of the man,” he said. “I was a young broker.”
In the late 1980s, Mr. Trump’s newspaper ads cited Ms. Corcoran’s report as proof that his units were the most expensive in the city.
But Mr Trump has faced financial and legal challenges, with his companies filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at least six times in the 1990s and 2000s. As he bounced back from financial failure, he accomplished something new: He began leasing his name for a fee, which appeared on buildings he didn’t build and only some of which his company managed.
The move, ahead of its time, upended and modified the usual real estate formula, which dictates that location and floor plan equal value, said one longtime Manhattan developer. Now, there was a location, a floor plan and also a brand — the Trump name, which had an aspirational quality, said the developer, one of three major Manhattan developers who discussed the Trump brand, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
‘Embarrassed’
In 2012, Linda Gottlieb, the producer of the movie “Dirty Dancing” didn’t think much of walking under a Trump sign every time she entered her building. Her apartment building at 160 Riverside Boulevard was part of “Trump Place,” a group of six towers—three of them rentals and three of them condos—that spanned several blocks overlooking the Hudson River at 120, 140, 160, 180, 200 and 220 Riverside Boulevard.
In some of the buildings, everything from doormats to staff uniforms bore the Trump name.
But as the 2016 presidential election approached and Mr. Trump’s crude remarks about women and immigrants dominated the news cycle, Ms. Gottlieb felt embarrassed.
“I was embarrassed,” she said, describing how she felt when she passed by the maintenance staff who were born outside the United States. “Every time I looked at them, I thought, how is it possible for them to work in a building like this, and how can I not try to do something about it?”
He helped draft a petition to remove the Trump name from the building, sliding it under the doors of more than 450 units. By fall 2016, three of the buildings — all rentals — had removed the Trump name and counted staff members for new uniforms. The apartment buildings, including the one in legal dispute, removed the name in 2018 and 2019.
These days, Ms. Gottlieb returns to a building that has a sign that reads 1-6-0, her address on Riverside Boulevard.
“Now, I just enjoy the view of the river when I come home,” he said, “and I think it’s so cool to be in a building with a boring number on it.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Charles V. Bagley contributed reporting from New York. Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.