Trump Plans South Florida Office Building As $454M Judgement Looms
With New York’s attorney general preparing to potentially seize Donald Trump’s properties, the former president is planning to build a new office at his golf course in Jupiter, Florida.
Plans call for a three-story office building on a parking lot at Trump National, the golf club north of Palm Beach that the former president has owned since 2012. The 45K SF building could cost up to $15M to build and would be used for Trump’s Florida club operations, although it would be large enough to host some of his other companies, The Palm Beach Post reported.
Trump's sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. both live in Jupiter and work out of offices at the golf course.
“We look forward to adding this beautiful building to our already amazing property and club,” Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said in a statement to the Post.
Plans for the building, designed by Rick Gonzalez at West Palm Beach-based REG Architects, have not yet been submitted to the city of Jupiter for approval.
The parcel chosen for the office on the northeast corner of Donald Ross Road is zoned for residential development, so the plans would require land-use and zoning changes, Jupiter’s Planning and Zoning Director John Sickler told the Post.
The Trump Organization didn’t respond to Bisnow’s request for comment.
Trump’s Florida properties and businesses include the Jupiter golf course, the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Trump National Doral in Miami-Dade County and his Mar-a-Lago club.
Appraisals for Mar-a-Lago were a key facet of a fraud trial in New York where Justice Arthur Engoron found that Trump had inflated the value of his properties to secure favorable loan terms and ordered The Trump Organization to pay $454M in penalties and interest.
Engoron ruled that Trump had inflated the value of the Mar-a-Lago estate by 2,300% based on tax assessor valuations. Real estate professionals in Florida questioned that assessment, including one Palm Beach real estate broker who testified on behalf of Trump at the trial.
Trump’s Florida club operations currently work out of a small office at Trump National in Jupiter. The plans for a new office building come as New York Attorney General Letitia James has signaled she will seize some of the former president’s real estate assets if he fails to pay the penalty or post the $454M bond required for him to appeal the fraud verdict.
Lawyers for The Trump Organization said this week that they had been unable to find a surety company to accept his companies as collateral for a bond.
The attorney general’s office in New York has been skeptically eyeing recent disclosures from the Trump Organization that several of his New York companies had changed their address to the Jupiter golf course.
Lawyers said in a March 11 filing that the relocation efforts were evidence that Trump cannot be trusted when he says his assets will never be “secreted” out of New York, the Post reported.
If James moves to seize Trump’s assets, she would not be limited to properties in New York and could try to take over his assets in Florida to pay the $454M judgment.
