"Archive: Donald Trump breathes new life into Dutchess golf course". The Poughkeepsie Journal. Retrieved September 1, 2019. ^ Overby, Peter (October 5, 2017). "Trump's Puerto Rico Golf Venture: Not Such A Great Deal". NPR. Retrieved May 25, 2021. ^ Allen, Karma (July 13, 2015).
The Trump Organization operates the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, New York, a public golf course built and owned by New York City, under a 20-year contract awarded in 2013 by the administration of then- Mayor Bloomberg. The course opened in 2015.
Donald Trump did not set Coco Beach Golf and Country Club on course for ruin, but he wasn’t able to save it from that fate. His role in the bankruptcy of the company, which ended up costing Puerto Rican taxpayers $32.6 million, was significant but limited.
In 2000 and 2004, Puerto Rico’s Industrial, Tourist, Educational, Medical and Environmental Control Facilities Financing Authority (AFICA) issued the owners of the club a total of $25,497,854 in bonds to help build and launch the resort.
His role in the bankruptcy of the company, which ended up costing Puerto Rican taxpayers $32.6 million, was significant but limited. That $32.6 million loss constituted 0.03 percent of the territory’s total $123 billion debt, which prompted the Puerto Rican government to file for bankruptcy relief in May 2017.
By October 2011, Coco Beach had defaulted on $26 million in bonds and had to seek another round of financing. In 2015, the company filed for bankruptcy under its original name, Coco Beach Golf and Country Club, citing debts of more than $78 million but only $9 million in assets. Bankruptcy court records show that Puerto Rico’s Tourism Development ...
When the Trump International Golf Club filed for Bankruptcy in July 2015 -- just a month after Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign -- Trump's family members did everything they could to distance themselves from the failed project. See full story.
Alex Shnaider, the developer behind the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Toronto, reportedly made moves to take the New York developer's name off the building in 2015, after Trump started running for president. See full story .
The 13-story Trump hotel should have been a sun-kissed shoreline landmark. Instead, the project remains 40% incomplete, and the developer has become ensnared in a corruption investigation. See full story .
In 2006, Trump and billionaire condo king Jorge Perez began selling a 23-story apartment building near Trump's exclusive club, Mar-a-Lago, but the project was abandoned a year later because of slow sales.
In 1994 a group of Chinese investors bailed Trump out of a debt-laded property on New York City's Upper West Side but kept him on as a 30% partner. Twelve years later they flipped the property for $1.76 billion and used the proceeds to buy 1290 Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan and the 555 California Street in San Francisco. See full story.
Donald Trump famously failed in Atlantic City, but he’s scored big in Vegas, courtesy of his partner, billionaire Phil Ruffin—who is taking steps to open a new Trump casino there. See full story .
Hary Tanoesoedibjo shares more than luxury resorts with the 45th president. The Indonesian billionaire has turned himself into a full-fledged mini-Trump, down to the beauty pageants, TV shows and incessant tweeting. And he’s now laying the groundwork to become president of the world’s fourth-largest country. See full story .
But those skills were sorely tested in Puerto Rico. Here's what happened, starting a decade ago:
In fact, it was not all that unusual. The club fit a formula Trump regularly uses: golf plus branding, with high-end residential mixed in. One recent example is the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai — an extravagant 18-hole course and 100 luxury villas.
In 2011, the club's debt got rolled together in a refinancing for $26.4 million. All along, the deal had resembled the U.S. housing crisis — i.e., it had a balloon mortgage, with small, interest-only payments for the first several years.
The Trump family distanced itself from the project’s failure, claiming that the real estate developer merely licensed his name to the property. But a review of hundreds of pages of corporate and legal filings, undertaken by BuzzFeed News, shows that Trump promised the club’s investors and the government of Puerto Rico something entirely different.
The two courses of what was first named the Coco Beach Golf & Country Club cover a peninsula on the island’s northeast corner, near the El Yunque rainforest. The surrounding resort includes a luxury hotel, timeshares, and the Trump Founders Residences, condos whose buyers are required to join the golf club.
In effect, Trump was guaranteed income even if the project lost money; by the end of 2012, he had claimed more than $600,000.
To Craig McCann, of the Securities Litigation and Consulting Group, who has testified in cases involving Puerto Rico municipal bonds, Trump’s promise to put the club in the black was “ridiculous on its face.” McCann wondered “how this statement can be made repeatedly when the resort had huge negative cash flows every year from 2008 when Trump took over to 2012 and beyond.”.
As a real estate developer, Trump began acquiring and constructing golf courses in 1999. By the time of his election as United States President in 2016, he owned 17 golf courses worldwide through his holding company, the Trump Organization. Courses owned by Trump have been selected to host various PGA and LPGA events, including the upcoming 2022 PGA Championship (although the PGA terminated this in the aftermath of the 2021 storming of the US Capitol ). A spokesman for the Trump Organization said that "This is a breach of a binding contract and they have no right to terminate the agreement".
In 1999 , Trump opened his first golf course: the Trump International Golf Club, West Palm Beach in Florida. Land for the US$45 million course was acquired through a lawsuit against Palm Beach County, Florida, after Trump's purchase of the Mar-a-Lago resort. By 2007, Trump owned 4 courses around the US.
The course, which opened in 2015, is called Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, New York. Under the agreement, the city paid the course's utility and water bills while collecting no income for the first four years. In the first year of operation, ending in March 2016, the company had $8 million in gross receipts, and the city paid $1 million in water and sewage bills. In the second year of operation, gross receipts dropped 9.5%. For the operating year that ended March 2019, the Trump Organization reported a loss of $122,000; it now faces contractual fees of at least $300,000 per operating year from the city.
Over nearly two decades (as he reported in his 2000–2018 tax filings), these golf courses had combined losses of $315.6 million.
In November 2018, The Washington Post found that the average number of days between golf rounds was around 5 days for Trump, and around 12–13 days for Obama.
Trump, according to Jack Nicklaus, "loves the game of golf more than he loves money". According to Golf Digest, his handicap is as low as 2 .8. Trump began playing golf during his college years at the University of Pennsylvania.