Former President Donald Trump hasn’t been faring well with tenants at his Trump Tower building in Manhattan, as a new report from The Washington Post explains. A few key corporate tenants have fallen majorly behind on rent, and in a couple of cases, they’ve abandoned the premises, leaving the Trump company with a considerable amount of its retail space unoccupied. In the first quarter of this year, just 75 percent of Trump Tower’s commercial space was occupied, which is the lowest occupancy rate for that commercial space for any year “going back to 2013,” the Post explains, based on data from Trepp.
A clothing company known as Marcraft Clothes was among the Trump Tower tenants to end up in financial turmoil. Eventually, that company fell $664,000 behind on its rent for Trump Tower, and they’ve now left the space that they previously occupied in the building. Another high-profile tenant at Trump Tower has been the Legacy Business School, where at one point Kris Jenner (of Kardashian family fame) served as chairwoman. As part of a lawsuit from Legacy investors against founder Alessandro Nomellini, details emerged indicating that, as of last year, the school owed a total of $198,000 to Trump’s company for costs including rent.
The issues continue from there. Another high-profile corporate tenant at Trump Tower had been Marc Fisher Footwear, which manufactured the shoes sold under the Ivanka Trump brand alongside others. Earlier this year, the Trump company filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer, saying that it owed over $1.4 million after having simply stopped paying rent in November of last year. That lawsuit was settled in April, and a source told the Post that the company had left its Trump Tower space behind.
There’s one tenant with a continued presence at Trump Tower — the former president’s political action committee, which is known as the Make America Great Again PAC. Beginning in March of this year, that committee has paid $37,541.67 each month to rent space at Trump Tower, in addition to several months of $3,000 payments earlier this year for a retail kiosk in the building’s lobby, although the lobby has actually been closed. Liz Harrington, a Trump spokesperson, said that the PAC paid for that retail kiosk because, after taking over the space from the campaign, campaign-related merchandise remained there as officials anticipated a re-opening that didn’t arrive. (Kiosk payments stopped in May.) Essentially, this set-up means that significant sums of money brought in from the former president’s supporters have been heading right into his company’s bank accounts. Read more at this link.
