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Trump's Boyhood Home in Queens Flips For $2.14 Million

By Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska | March 27, 2017 1:29pm
 The house at 85-15 Wareham Place, where Donald Trump lived as a boy, was sold for $2.14 million last week.
The house at 85-15 Wareham Place, where Donald Trump lived as a boy, was sold for $2.14 million last week.
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Paul Brainard

QUEENS — A real estate mogul who bought President Donald Trump’s boyhood home in the affluent Jamaica Estates neighborhood for $1.39 million in December flipped it at an auction for three-quarters of a million dollars more than what he paid, auctioneers said Monday.

Manhattan real estate investor Michael Davis sold the property at 85-15 Wareham Place — where Trump was born and lived until he was 4 —  for $2.14 million last week.  

“This is a house that would otherwise be worth about $1 million dollars, and we sold it for over twice that price," Misha Haghani, owner of Paramount Realty USA, which handled the auction, said Monday.

Some speculated ahead of the auction that the property which — as President Trump’s boyhood home might become an official historic site one day would fetch as much as $10 million

“This property is so much more than just real estate,” noted Haghani, who closed the sale last Thursday. "It’s the childhood home of the 45th President of the United States. That intangible value makes it a perfect example of why special properties are appropriately sold by auction, just like art is.”

Haghani declined to reveal the name of the buyer who snatched up the 2,500-square foot brick-and-stucco house, but he told DNAinfo New York that the name of the entity that purchased it is Trump Birth House LLC.

The five-bedroom Tudor which also features four-and-a-half bathrooms, a living room with a fireplace, a five-car driveway with a two-car garage, was auctioned in January after Davis bought from previous property owners, the Kestenbergs, who are restaurateurs in Manhattan.

Initially, the Kestenbergs listed the house on the market last July for $1.65 million, but then reduced the price twice, first to $1.399 million and later to $1.25 million, according to the property's listing broker Laffey Real Estate.

They then planned to sell the property at an auction last October — the night of the third debate between then candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — but postponed it at the last minute to give prospective buyers more time to see the home amid media attention surrounding the sale.

In December, however, they decided to sell it to Davis who carried out the original plan to auction it after the election.

The Kestenbergs, who purchased the house in 2008 for $782,500, sold it to Davis because they were getting divorced and were satisfied with the price offered by the buyer, Haghani told DNAinfo in December.

Donald Trump's father built the house in 1940. The family later moved to a larger house on nearby Midland Parkway.

Trump himself joked on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" last year that he was interested in the property.

"I wanna buy it, it's beautiful," he said.