Why is Donald Trump always in Mar-a-Lago when he has a country to manage?
The Mar-a-Lago villa in Palm Beach is undoubtedly the top location of Donald Trump's preferences for a weekend of relaxation. As Chase Peterson-Withorn writes in Forbes, it is also one of the best investments the current president of the United States has ever made. In 1985 Trump bought Mar-a-Lago for about 10 million dollars: 5 million for the house, about 3 million for its sumptuous furnishings, plus 2 million for the private beach directly across the street. Today, Forbes values Mar-a-Lago - one of the hardest assets in Trump's portfolio to estimate - at around $ 160 million, or 16 times what Trump paid for it. However, it is unclear how much money the president has invested or withdrawn from the property over the years.
A return that even beats the S & P500 index, which produced a return equal to 12 times the investment, always in the same period. Trump is especially grateful for Palm Beach’s rise in real estate prices over the past thirty years and for turning the property into a private club and, now, the "Southern White House".
The building was originally the winter estate of grain heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (founder of General Foods) who built it during the 1920s land boom in Florida, bringing the material for the exterior walls directly from Genoa a gold leaf modeled in the Galleria dell' Accademia in Venice and the 16th century Romanesque busts for the atrium. In all, the house has 58 bedrooms on 17 hectares of land, on which citrus groves and greenhouses are located.
When Post died in 1973, she offered Mar-a-Lago to the federal government for presidential use. But in 1981, faced with huge maintenance costs, the government ceded the property to the Marjorie Merriweather Post Foundation, which sold it to Trump four years later for about $ 10 million. In 1995, Trump transformed the residence into a private Palm Beach jet club, embellishing it with an ocean-view pool, beauty salon, spa and tennis courts.
After the US elections, the Trump organization doubled the affiliate commission in Mar-a-Lago to $ 200,000. The club's revenues reached approximately $ 29 million in 2016, up 25% from the previous year.
