Can Someone Good at the Economy Please Help, My Big Gaudy Apartment Building Is Dying

By Rafi Schwartz  |  May 14, 2019 | 2:19pm
Trumpland

President Donald Trump’s golden Manhattan skyscraper is ostensibly the flagship property of the Trump family’s global empire. But, according to an analysis from Bloomberg on Tuesday, Trump Tower has become a property pariah, with falling occupancy rates from residents eager to disassociate themselves from the president’s extremely tarnished brand.

“The name on the building became a problem,” former Trump Tower resident Michael Sklar told Bloomberg, which noted that that he’d “sold his parents’ 57th floor unit for $1.83 million in October after they spent $400,000 to remodel the property. His family purchased it for $1.4 million in 2004, which comes out to $1.84 million after adjusting for inflation.”

All told, Trump Tower’s occupancy rate has dropped from 99 to 83 percent over the past seven years, putting it at around twice the average Manhattan vacancy rate, per Bloomberg’s analysis. And of the 13 condos sold in the building over the past two years, at least eight of them were sold at an inflation-adjusted loss.

“If I were looking for office space, that would be a building I’d want to avoid,” one market analyst told the site.

Bloomberg’s analysis of Trump Tower’s slumping residency comes on the heels of a Guardian report showing the property risks paying $850,000 in annual fines over the coming decade if it does not comply with New York City’s new environmental regulations requiring large buildings to cut greenhouse emissions nearly in half by 2030.

As Bloomberg notes, Trump Tower is still generating a profit—helped by the fact that the president has based his 2020 reelection campaign there. (Trump’s two presidential campaigns have spent at least $13 million at various Trump properties over the past four years). However, the building is reportedly still more than 25 percent off what financiers had expected it would be earning when they evaluated Trump Tower for a $100 million loan in 2012.

Who could have seen it comin’?

 
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