The owners of Donald Trump’s boyhood home in Queens could also wind up winners in the 2016 presidential election.
The five-bedroom, Tudor-style home where the president-elect was born and lived until he was 4 years old is set to go to auction soon, and its value is expected to have increased dramatically since Tuesday, a real estate expert said.
“It’s no longer the childhood home of the Republican candidate, it’s now the childhood home of the current president-elect so that makes it part of an exclusive set of properties in this country,” said Misha Haghani, owner of Paramount Realty USA, which is handling the auction.
“Once Trump is inaugurated, there will be only 45 properties in this country that are the birth homes of presidents so it becomes much more exclusive now,” he noted.
The 2,500-square foot brick and stucco house at 85-15 Wareham Place in the affluent Jamaica Estates neighborhood was scheduled to go to auction in October but the owners decided to postpone it until after the election.
Haghani said it’s hard to estimate how much the property will sell for now. Usually, he said, the value of a home is estimated by comparing it to similar properties in the same area. (The average price for a Tudor house in the neighborhood is currently about $2 million, experts said.)
“But that doesn’t reflect the intangible value of this property,” Haghani said about the house that Trump discussed on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" earlier this year.
(Credit: "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon")
The asking price for the house, however, has been reduced twice since it was listed on the market in July for $1.65 million — first to $1,399,000, and later to $1,250,000, according to the property's listing broker Laffey Real Estate.
“I’m focused on selling it,” said Howard Kaminowitz, a broker with Laffey Real Estate, who declined to discuss the current value of the house.
“The buyers will tell us what it’s worth through the auction format,” Haghani said.
The property which features four-and-a-half bathrooms, a living room with fireplace, a patio and a five-car driveway with two-car garage, was built in 1940.
The Trump family later moved to a larger house on nearby Midland Parkway.
The property owners, who are restaurateurs in Manhattan, bought the house in 2008 for $782,500, and are selling it because they are getting divorced, Haghani said.
The auction will likely be scheduled for early December, he added.
To see more photos of the house, go here.
