Trump has claimed his Florida resort is worth as much as $1.5 billion, but the Palm Beach County property appraiser valued it far lower.
A Democratic House member is asking Palm Beach County, Florida, to tax Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property at the rate the former president claims it is worth amid his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York.
In a letter first provided to NBC News, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., issued the request to Dorothy Jacks, Palm Beach County’s property appraiser.
Moskowitz noted New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s ruling last week saying that Trump repeatedly committed acts of fraud for years. Engoron ruled that Trump lied to banks and insurers by overvaluing and undervaluing his assets while exaggerating his net worth to billions of dollars.
I’m like 90% sure I saw a headline a month or so ago saying Trump “sold” Mar-a-Lago to his son. Seems like you could just take a look at that sale price for both the taxes and to evaluate its worth, although since it was sold to a family member the valuation is a bit suspect.
Edit: Since people are still commenting on it, see the child comments on here for details, but apparently that headline was incorrect and based on a bogus Zillow listing.
That was actually untrue. Zillow removed the listing and admitted it never happened.
Interesting. I wonder if it was a listing created by someone else to generate controversy or how such a listing was generated. I’ve never used Zillow, do they not do any kind of verification of ownership before posting a listing? If so that seems like a massive opportunity for scammers. I’ll need to do some googling and see if I can find that news story because all I saw was the previous headline claiming it had been sold.
Edit: After some digging my opinion of Zillow is now pretty low. Apparently the report of the sale was filled with major red flags but Zillow still listed it without question. The contact for the sale was listed as Brad Pitt, and the square footage was listed as 6,000 square feet instead of the actual square footage of 62,500. Both of those errors should have been enough to get someone at Zillow to take a much closer look, but apparently the only thing they actually checked was that the address listed on the sale matched.
Yeah, Zillow has a property I own listed as a 4 BR, 3 Bath house, valued at a half a million bucks. There’s no actual structure at all–much less a house!!–on the property! And the property itself is worth about 100k at the most.
I don’t know where they get their info from, but I know for sure they do not verify.
If true, it’s Florida law that the property be reassessed.
Turns out it isn’t, see any of the other comments in here. It was all based on a listing Zillow put up that was in turn based on something that was apparently bogus. Details on what source Zillow used seem hard to come by, but I did see one report claiming that that source listed the point of contact for the sale as Brad Pitt and that the square footage was an entire order of magnitude smaller than it actually is.
You saw and fell victim to a bullshit headline. That you apparently unwittingly believed it and never checked back means that whoever wanted that headline out there got exactly what they wanted.
I have no love for Trump but people have GOT to start being vastly more critical of what they read online, especially when its something so blatantly unusual.
So what happened?
Details are limited, but what I’ve been able to piece together is that someone got a bogus sale report into some kind of feed that Zillow monitors. The report was full of factual red flags, but apparently Zillow didn’t bother doing any kind of verification and just blindly listed the sale on their website. Various media outlets then saw the Zillow listing did some minimal digging and ran stories reporting the sale. At that point places like lemmy then had posts referencing the various media sources, who of course cited Zillow, who doesn’t make their sources public.
After the story blew up Trump and his relatives responded saying the story was false at which point it seems Zillow finally took a look at things and realized whatever source they used was bogus. Zillow then removed the sale report from their site and issued a notice that “a mistake” had led to an incorrect listing being published.
What happened is that someone reported a false sale to Zillow. Who did it and why are up for speculation but it was almost certainly meant as an outrage generator and it apparently worked perfectly.
Who you calling a child?
Uhm, are you joking? I think you meant this as a joke, but I’m not completely sure.
I’m joking, sorry, lol.
I’m a child comment, see!
Ah, I thought it was a joke, but it was always possible you greatly miss read what I had said or perhaps that you weren’t a native English speaker. Figured I should make sure.
A bit suspect? A bit? You’re dense enough for tank armor.
Rude
Dense? Sounded like sarcasm to me.
You’ve never heard of exaggeration?
This is why centrists lean right -_- stop attacking someone you essentially agree with, it’s pointless.
Because of people on the Internet being mean instead of, yknow, policies?
They’re as much a big group of utterly disgusting morally deficited morons as I thought!
Nevermind “conservatives” are so much more blatantly horrible online.
Jeez, think before you type
I did think before I typed. I’m not a centrist, and I’m not conservative. I’m pointing out a long running issue with people on the left attacking others on the left.
Also why put conservatives in quotes? Conservatives ARE more blatantly horrible online, but not to other conservatives. They are welcoming to centrists, unlike Leftists.
You’re actually continuing to prove my point. Insulting everyone that doesn’t 100% agree with you is bad. Maybe having good policies AND not being a dick is a good idea