Want Something To Fail? Just Attach The Name "Trump" To It

So Trump is encouraging MAGAt truck drivers to boycott his hometown. I wonder if the boycott includes Staten Island, which voted  57% Trump, the same as Kansas, Mississippi, Indiana, Missouri and Montana.

Peter Wade reported that “Chicago Ray” posted a video to Twitter, on Friday night “claiming that he has spoken to ‘at least’ 10 truckers who will ‘start refusing loads’ headed for New York City… ‘Such an honor to have so many Great Patriots on the side of FREEDOM!’ Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, celebrating the trucker campaign on Saturday night. ‘Joe Biden’s Unfair and Dangerous Weaponization of Law Enforcement is a serious threat to Democracy. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’… Whether the truckers’ campaign will grow large enough to result in any disruption of the flow of goods into New York remains to be seen. At the moment, we only have Ray’s claims, although his video received more than six million views as of early Sunday afternoon. Ray promised to give followers an update on Monday.”

I don’t know how Trump made the time with the launch of his newest soon to fail business, Trump Sneakers. The shoes, called ‘The Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker,’ sell for $399. The pair, along with two low-top sneakers, and a $99 bottle of ‘Victory47’ perfume and cologne were available for purchase on a new website.” He introduced the new brand at Sneaker Con in Philly where he was loudly booed.

I wonder if it’ll work out better than the values of his New York properties, which have all been collapsing. Rukmini Callimachi did an incredible job investigating and reporting the disaster that is Trump-branded real estate. “[U]p and down the spine of Manhattan, condominiums in high-rise buildings emblazoned with Trump’s name have underperformed, according to sales data from two real estate tracking firms, and an analysis of the data by the Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. The line in the sand is the year 2016, when Trump was elected president.”

In a one-year window, condos in buildings that had the Trump logo went from selling at a 1 percent premium compared with similar units, to selling for 4 percent less, meaning that Trump condos became a “bargain” among the city’s luxury units, said Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate.

Even the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, one of the crowning achievements of the Trump brand, whose 80-foot cascade flowing down a wall of peach marble was reportedly built with slabs handpicked at a quarry in Italy by Trump’s ex-wife, saw the average price per square foot of its condominiums tumble 49 percent since 2013, according to Ondel Hylton, the senior director of content and research at CityRealty. The building’s age, growing competition from the ultra-luxurious condos on nearby Billionaires’ Row and regular protests have all dampened interest, Mr. Hylton said.

By contrast, condominiums in four buildings where the Trump logo was removed at the behest of residents— sometimes after a legal battle— have seen their value shoot back up.

“This analysis cleanly identifies that it is the Trump brand that is responsible for the value deterioration,” 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 carry the Trump name found that the value dropped 23 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to CityRealty, a real estate listing website. An analysis using a slightly different methodology by ATTOM, a property data analytics company, showed that the drop was 17 percent.

By contrast, the four buildings that removed the gold-hued Trump logo ended the decade from 2013 to 2023 up 9 percent, outpacing the Manhattan condominium market, which was up 8 percent over the same time period, according to City Realty.

Van Nieuwerburgh started with the same data, then combed through the sales figures, making sure that he was comparing apples to apples: a three-bedroom condo in a doorman-serviced Trump building on the Upper West Side, for example, was compared to a three-bedroom unit in the same neighborhood in a building that also had a doorman.

He found that the Trump-branded buildings collapsed in value by 25 percent compared with similar properties from their peak in 2013. “It’s huge,” he said.

…In an email, Eric Trump wrote “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 properties in the world. That is undeniable,” he wrote. “This year alone, Trump International Hotel & Tower New York closed on a $17 million unit, exceeding the prices at Time Warner, Essex House and the most prestigious properties in the city.”

But the $17 million condo sale 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 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 best-selling condo in a Trump-branded building placed No. 47 on the list, while the second-best-selling unit placed No. 77, CityRealty found.

“I just crunched the numbers in the past half hour, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it,” said Hylton, CityRealty’s senior director of content and research, who expressed surprise at how much value Trump-branded condos had lost.