A few days ago I wrote a brief diary on Donald Trump State Park in Yorktown NY. Bought for $2.75 million with plans to develop the property into a golf course, there were pollution problems so Trump donated it to NY State. He valued the donation at $26 million or $100 million (which valuation was used is unclear). NO independent valuation seems to have been obtained so it is unclear where either valuation came from. Trump’s ‘family compound’ — Seven Springs in Mt Kisco NY — is 50,000 sq. ft. with 3 pools and carriage houses. He paid $7.5 million for this property in 1996. From a Vanity Fair article
www.vanityfair.com/…
The estate is “really our compound,” Eric Trump told the magazine then, recalling his summers and weekends there with Donald Trump Jr. when they rode ATVs and went fishing. “It was home base for us for a long, long time,” Eric said, “until I finally bought another house and moved out.”
But this ‘family compound’ is classified as an ‘investment property’ and owned by a corporation. Therefore its nearly $500,000 in local property taxes are deductible as a ‘business expense’.
Trump’s changes to tax laws limit deductions on taxes for everyone else’s residence to $10,000. For the record $10,000 in local taxes is half of what is due on an ordinary house in most of Westchester County. So Trump is fine with removing tax exemptions for ordinary people — as long as he can get around them.
Opposition to Trump’s plans to develop part of the property into a golf course (ANOTHER Trump golf course) led to him set up a conservation easement on a large part of the property adding to his tax deductions.
From lo-hud
www.lohud.com/…
The appraisal at Seven Springs was conducted by Cushman & Wakefield, the national commercial real estate company currently marketing office space at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The company valued the entire property at $56.5 million, with the development rights worth $21 million, according to the Times.
It seems that this arrangement is but one of the transactions being investigated by the NYS Attorney General. Trump truly is a business magician — turning a home into a business investment and avoiding the $10,000 property tax limit HE set under tax law changes, taking deductions on property valued at 10 times its original cost. That’s how you pay $750 in taxes, when you in the rare year when ARE paying taxes.