[Atlantis]

Trump has been very successful at running companies into bankruptcy. His gamble with the presidency seems to have been to lose it. With the unexpected win of the presidency, he could now risk losing his real estate empire.

Nobody knows how much Trump is really worth and how highly his assets are leveraged. He owns the Trump brand, but except for a couple of places, he doesn't own the actual real estate. Since his arrival at the White House, real estate and hotel managers around the world have been trying to get rid of the Trump brand because it has become a liability and, instead of increasing real estate value, many of Trump branded properties are now losing value, because most people don't want to be associated with the Trump brand. Who would want to pay big bugs for what could soon become a "Trump shit hole?"

Is this the beginning of the end of Trump's real estate empire?

[...]

Tensions are high at Trump Place, 200 Riverside Boulevard. The luxury condominium complex on New York’s Upper West Side is currently embroiled in an increasingly contentious legal battle with the Trump family. Like many of the towers bearing the Trump brand, 200 Riverside Boulevard isn’t actually owned by the Trumps; it simply licenses the name, which is plastered on the building in big brass letters. And now many residents don’t want it any more.

Audrey Nelson lives with her boyfriend in Trump Place. Speaking to me on the street outside, she explains that the condo board surveyed residents about the Trump branding following the 2016 election. “Most people want to get rid of it,” she says. But DJT Holdings, a company largely owned by Donald Trump, got wind of this and was threatening the building with legal action. “I don’t think we’re supposed to talk about it,” says another resident, eyeing me suspiciously.

Plastering the Trump brand – which can cost tens of millions of dollars to lease – on your luxury hotel or apartment complex once added a veneer of prestige and upped profitability; Trump used to boast it would increase a property’s value by 25%. Licensing his name certainly seems to have increased his personal fortune. A financial summary Trump issued when he kicked off his presidential campaign in 2015 valued his “real estate licensing deal, brand and branded developments” at $3.3bn – the most significant single source of what Trump then claimed to be an $8.7bn total net worth.
[...]
Since the Donald embarked upon his political career his surname appears to have become a liability. Speaking to me over the phone, previous 200 Riverside Boulevard tenants told me that Trump’s foray into politics has been disastrous for property prices. Harvey and Peggy Koeppel put their apartment on the market just before the 2016 election. “It sat there for months,” Harvey Koeppel says, until they were forced to “accept 10% less than their asking price”.

It’s not just the Koeppels who have seen the value of their Trump-associated property fall. According to a recent report by CityRealty, a real estate listings and research service, prices in the 11 Trump-branded condo buildings in Manhattan dropped below the borough average for the first time ever at the end of 2017. While the average price per square foot for all Manhattan condos fell by 1%, the price per square foot for condos in Trump buildings fell 7% in the 12 months to November 2017.

“Any building that chooses to end its association with the Trump brand is likely motivated by financial reasons … [and] no doubt greatly influenced by beliefs about how the brand affects the building’s bottom line,” says Gabby Warshawer, director of research for CityRealty. All of which, she says, raises “questions about the viability of the Trump brand”.

Indeed, just down the road from where I’m standing, three other apartment buildings were also once known as Trump Place. Just eight days after the 2016 election, the rental buildings rebranded as 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Boulevard, after hundreds of the building’s residents petitioned the owner, Equity Residential, to “dump the Trump name”. The brand no longer signified premium, but prejudice, said residents: it had become an embarrassment. (The Trump Organization declined multiple times to contribute to this story.)

More recently, a hybrid hotel and condo building in downtown Manhattan also disassociated itself from the president, rebranding from Trump SoHo to the Dominick last December. The building’s owners bought out the Trump Organization’s management contract following unrelenting bad press and reports of low occupancy, some of which, to be fair, predated Trump’s entering the White House.
[...]

What is depressing is that the average American seems to believe that Trump's type of branding business, which cannot produce anything, is a useful activity that should be rewarded with money and social standing. Is the average Joe so far removed from everything resembling productive labor that he cannot understand that this sort of business is no more socially useful than a pyramid scheme? America is known as the land of unlimited possibilities, that is obviously true since even crooks can become successful businessmen and national leaders.