Donald Trump 1980 Interview

Trying to scrape up a down payment for a little fixer-upper in your neighborhood? Take a look at my next guest. There's a report around Wall Street that this is what he has in mind. This is Donald Trump, 33 years old, and some people think that he wants to buy the World Trade Center, the 110-story Manhattan skyscraper that anyone can pick up if they've got the coins. Donald Trump, as I say, is just 33 years old. He took his father's rather modest-by-current standards real estate empire in Brooklyn and expanded it considerably. He now has an apartment for sale in a new Trump building called the Trump Tower, going up on Fifth Avenue. There it is. You can buy this apartment, one floor of it, one whole floor of that building, that is, $11 million altogether. You bought some prized properties at the bottom of the New York market in the 1970s. Inner cities have been pure gold since that time. Why? Because replacement costs have just gone up so much? Well, no, not really. I had a great faith in New York. Primarily, our purchases have been in New York, and about five years ago, New York was not considered very hot, and cities in general weren't considered too hot. And we purchased the old Commodore Hotel, and we've reconverted that now into about a $110 million Grand Hyatt Hotel, which is opening up next week in New York City. And we've made some other purchases that have been fine. Is that your general advice to people who are interested in real estate investment, though? Look to the inner cities, look to old buildings, and doing something with that? Well, I like the inner cities. I see the inner cities as being sort of a wave of the future now. I think with the problems of fuel and the gasoline shortages and everything else, and the transportation, especially in the major cities such as New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, I see the inner cities as being probably, in terms of a real estate or in a real estate sense, probably the most viable investments. But it's going to be expensive. Apartments in New York City alone, one bedroom, not very large at all, $650 a month, that's tough for the working class, isn't it? And that's actually now a very low price. In fact, if you have any of them available, I'd like to... I know where I can sell a thousand of them at that price. Actually, that is a low price. That's really a very low price now. I know of a couple of buildings, for instance, in Olympic Tower, which is on 51st Street and Fifth Avenue. Apartments are being rented by the condominium owners for $5,000 and $6,000 a month, and they're one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. So it's, when you say $600, even in other sections, it's almost becoming a low price. What happens to some of the old buildings in the inner cities that are works of art? You were recently the object of a lot of controversy because you ordered destroyed some sculptures on the building that you bought that the Metropolitan Art Museum wanted. Why did you have those destroyed, first of all, and what happens to the look of a city? Well, what we had is we purchased a site with an old department store on it, the old Barnwood Teller store on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street next to Tiffany, and we had to really take the building down. And there were many people that didn't want us to take it down. They wanted to try and preserve the building. But the building really was not worth, as an art building or an art deco building, it really was not worth very much. And we did take it down, and there was somewhat of an outcry. But I think that's generally subsided now, and I think people like what we're doing and like the building that we're putting in its place. But couldn't you have saved just those sculptures that you had? Well, it would have been very, very dangerous to have saved them. They were, they weighed two tons, they were 15 feet high, they were about two and a half feet thick, and if they would have fallen, they could have fallen the opposite way. If they fall into the building, you don't worry. If they fall out toward Fifth Avenue, people could have been very badly hurt and killed, and it just, to me, it was not worth it. And they've really proven not to be very valuable art structures right now, and we've had appraisals done. In fact, even after the fact, we've had appraisals done, and they've turned out not to be very valuable. Mr. Trump, what's left in your life? You're 33 years old, you're worth all this money. You say you didn't say that you want to be worth a billion dollars. No, I really don't. I just want to keep busy and keep active and be interested in what I do, and that's all there is to life as far as I'm concerned. I really am not looking to make tremendous amounts of money. I'm looking to enjoy my life, and if that happens to go with it, that's fabulous. Give me one final bottom line. In five years, the price hotel room in New York City will go for? It could be a thousand dollars a night. Start saving your money, folks. Just one night, a thousand dollars.