President Donald Trump’s decaying childhood home in Jamaica, Queens sold for $835,000 in a March real estate transaction — a far cry from the $2.14 million its erstwhile owner paid in 2017.
Trump lived in the 2,500 square foot home for the first four years of his life, but the property remained relatively obscure until the president’s 2016 run for the Oval Office. A speculator purchased the house in December 2016 before flipping it in early 2017 and turning a $750,000 profit.
To this day, the actual people who purchased the house in 2017 are unknown. The buyer was listed as Trump Birth House LLC in official documents and it is widely understood to be owned by Chinese investors. For about a month, the house served as an Airbnb (ABNB), before the city shut it down.
Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that renovators were gutting the decayed and dilapidated house. The new owner is a Brooklyn-based LLC called 1388 Group, which took out two mortgages to purchase the property. The mortgage lender is Accolend, which specializes in properties that buyers purchase to renovate and flip.
The Tudor-style residence, at 8515 Wareham Place, has drawn the ire of neighbors for years after falling into disrepair — though one enterprising local did take advantage of the vacant property and turn it into a home for a colony of feral cats.
The problem, neighbors contend, is that absentee investors bought the house to turn a profit, but quickly abandoned the project. Signs and notices thronging the house indicated that utilities had been shut off and warned passers-by from taking kittens from the property.
“Everyone wants to say it’s Donald Trump’s birth house,”neighbor Deborah Ayala-Braun told Curbed, in October. “But after that it was somebody else’s house, and after that it was somebody else’s house.”
When Curbed asked Ayala-Braun about her irritation with Trump’s five-bedroom, four-bathroom childhood home, she responded with an exasperated “where to begin?”
“There was the pipe that burst, which flooded our basement and other neighbors,” she said. Issues with the circuitry in Trump’s old house blacked out several adjacent homes for a week in the middle of the summer, leaving the neighborhood “dying” in the heat.
“I want it to be occupied,“ Ayala-Braun continued. “I want it to have purpose. I want it to have its own history going forward.”
Click through to see what the property looked like before it fell into disrepair.
