In the real estate world, the name Donald J. Trump has long been synonymous with luxury. In one of his buildings in Manhattan, a five-story waterfall cascades down a wall of Breccia Perniche marble. White-gloved bouncers, cascading chandeliers and panoramic views of the city skyline are the hallmarks of another.
It is this image of luxury that he has turned into a brand that the former president cited as a rebuttal to the recent lawsuit he lost on Friday after a judge found that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate holdings pay a penalty exceeding $450 million.
“My client is worth hundreds and hundreds of millions,” one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, said during the trial’s closing arguments, adding, “not to mention the brand is worth billions.”
But across Manhattan, condos in high-rises emblazoned with Mr. Trump's name have performed worse, according to sales data from two real estate tracking firms and an analysis of the data by Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.
The line in the sand is 2016, when Mr. Trump was elected president.
Within a year, condos in buildings bearing the Trump logo were selling at a price premium of 1 percent compared to similar units at a price of 4 percent less, meaning Trump condos became a “bargain” among luxury condos of the city were. 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 cascading down a wall of peach-colored marble was reportedly built from slabs found by Mr. Trump's ex-wife at a quarry in Italy saw 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, growing competition from ultra-luxury condos on nearby Billionaires' Row and regular protests have dampened interest, Hylton said.
By contrast, the value of condos in four buildings where the Trump logo was removed at the behest of residents, sometimes after a legal battle, has soared again.
“This analysis clearly shows that it is the Trump brand that is responsible for the decline in value,” said Van Nieuwerburgh. “Removing the Trump name from the building eliminates the loss associated with the name.”
A review of the price per square foot for condos in the seven Manhattan buildings that still bear the Trump name found that value fell 23 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to CityRealty, a real estate listing website. An analysis using a slightly different methodology by ATTOM, a real estate data analytics company, found the decline was 17 percent.
In contrast, the four buildings that had the gold Trump logo removed ended the decade from 2013 to 2023 up 9 percent, outperforming the Manhattan condo market, which was up 8 percent over the same period, according to City Realty increased.
Mr. Van Nieuwerburgh started with the same data, then went through the sales figures and made sure to compare apples to apples: comparing a three-bedroom apartment in a Trump building with concierge service on the Upper West Side to a three-bedroom, for example -Apartment in the same neighborhood in a building that also had a doorman.
He found that the value of Trump-branded buildings had plunged 25 percent compared to similar properties since their peak in 2013. “This is huge,” he said.
The data analyzed relates exclusively to Manhattan. It is possible that Mr. Trump's brand will resonate 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 and numerous others are located Towers in Sunny Isles Beach and Hollywood, Florida adorned with his name.
In an email, Eric Trump, the former president's son and de facto chief executive of the Trump Organization, questioned the analysis.
“Data can be manipulated to tell any story you want, but the fact remains that our buildings are selling for the highest prices per square meter of any property in the world.” That is undeniable,” he wrote. “This year alone, Trump International Hotel & Tower New York closed on a $17 million unit, surpassing prices at Time Warner, Essex House and the city’s most prestigious properties.”
But the $17 million sale of a condo at 1 Central Park West, also known as the Trump International Hotel, is a far cry from the top-selling condos in the city, which also includes a $52 million sale of a penthouse at West Village belonged. The Trump condo sold for over $4,600 per square foot; According to CityRealty, the penthouse sold for more than $11,400 per square foot.
A review of the top 100 sales in 2023 found that the best-selling condo in a Trump-branded building came in at No. 47 on the list, while the second best-selling unit came in at No. 77, CityRealty noted.
“I've just been going through the numbers for the last half hour, and I'm still trying to understand them,” said Mr. Hylton, senior director of content and research at CityRealty, who expressed surprise at the value of condos with the brand Trump had lost.
Definition of “most expensive”
Even Mr. Trump's critics say he deserves credit for the way he has harnessed the family fortune and boldly expanded his father's empire, from a portfolio that included thousands of mostly working-class apartments in the outer boroughs to the heart of Manhattan.
In the 1970s, when even the Chrysler Building was being foreclosed on, Mr. Trump bought the aging Commodore Hotel and transformed it into a gleaming Grand Hyatt, which in turn breathed new life into a neighborhood then considered rundown. Mr. Trump gambled on the location: The hotel was next to Grand Central Terminal and at the mouth of one of the main arteries into the city, the point through which commuters from upscale suburbs came.
“It was awesome,” said Barbara Corcoran, who sold her real estate company in 2001 for an estimated $70 million and is now a judge on “Shark Tank.” “42nd Street was a street you couldn’t walk down.”
The change was noticeable.
“He completely redefined the way people see life in New York,” Ms. Corcoran said.
More deals followed, but Mr. Trump's calculations were often based more on marketing than facts.
Ms. Corcoran, who was in her 30s and a newcomer to the real estate industry when she launched her eponymous “Corcoran Report” in 1981. Written on her typewriter and copied onto a Xerox machine, the report listed the best-selling properties in the city. Four years later, when it released its “Top Ten Condominiums Report,” it found that Mr. Trump's claim that his Trump Tower condos on Fifth Avenue were the most expensive in the world was false. (The future president's homes were on her list, she said, just not at the top.)
Before issuing her press release, she arranged a meeting so he could respond to her findings. Nervous, she couldn't sleep the night before and showed up at his office in a power suit, she said.
The meeting didn't go well. Mr. Trump objected to their methodology. On the spot, Ms. Corcoran said, she proposed a solution: If she recalculated the value of Mr. Trump's condos based on price per room or price per square foot, rather than the total sales price, he would come out top. The rooms in his building are small and therefore more expensive, she said.
“I didn’t want to make an enemy of the man,” she said. “I was a young broker.”
In his newspaper ads in the late 1980s, Trump cited Ms. Corcoran's report as evidence that his units were the most expensive in the city.
Trump began running ads like this starting in 1989, citing the “Corcoran Report” in which he claimed his Manhattan condos were the most expensive.Credit…ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times
But Mr. Trump ran into financial and legal trouble as his companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at least six times in the 1990s and 2000s. As he recovered from financial failure, he stumbled upon something new: He began renting out his name for a fee, appearing on buildings he did not build and only some of which his company managed.
The move, ahead of its time, upended and changed the usual real estate formula that says location plus floor plan equals value, said a longtime Manhattan developer. Now there was a location, a floor plan and a brand too – the Trump name, which had something aspirational about it, said the developer, one of three major Manhattan developers who discussed Trump's brand and all requested anonymity for fear of retaliation .
'Ashamed'
In 2012, Linda Gottlieb, the producer of the film “Dirty Dancing,” didn’t think much about having to walk under a Trump sign every time she entered her building. Their high-rise at 160 Riverside Boulevard was part of “Trump Place,” a group of six towers—three rentals and three condos—that spanned several blocks overlooking the Hudson River at 120, 140, 160, 180, 200 and 220 Riverside Blvd.
In some buildings, everything from the doormats to the staff uniforms bore the Trump name.
But as the 2016 presidential election approached and Mr. Trump's crude comments about women and immigrants dominated the news, Ms. Gottlieb felt ashamed.
“I was embarrassed,” she said, describing how she felt as she passed maintenance workers born outside the United States. “Every time I looked at them I thought: How can they work in a building like that and how can I not try to do something about it?”
She helped draft a petition to remove Trump's name from the building and hide it under the doors of the more than 450 apartment units. By the fall of 2016, three of the buildings — all rental buildings — had removed the Trump name and checked employees for new uniforms. The condo buildings, including the building under litigation, removed the name in 2018 and 2019.
These days, Ms. Gottlieb returns to a building with a sign reading 1-6-0, her address on Riverside Boulevard.
“Now I just enjoy the view of the river when I come home,” she said, “and I think it's so nice to be in a building that just has a boring number on it.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Charles V. Bagli contributed reporting from New York. Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.