Donald Trump Following the purchase of the Doral Golf Resort in Miami late last month, developer Donald Trump said today that he’s now looking all over the country for new real estate. He called into CNBC this morning and mentioned that Palm Beach, Fla., where he owns the Mar-a-Lago Club, is a good place to invest. “Palm Beach is a unique place,” Trump said. “It’s just rich and good,” mainly because he said that Palm Beach “is never affected by the economy,” though he did not specify exactly why. See the video after the jump.

The Kennedys and Palm Beach, Fla.

From the Florida website: According to Barron’s, the town of Palm Beach, Fla. is the ninth-best place for a second home in America. “This pedigreed place — the Kennedys and the Vanderbilts had oceanfront homes for decades — got its groove back in 2010, as residents recovered from the Bernie Madoff scandal and the ravages of the credit crisis,” the magazine proclaims. It calls the town part of the so-called “Iron Triangle” or American high society, along with New York and the Hamptons. First on the list was Sea Island, Ga., with Maui second. [more]

Palm Beach

From the February issue: Filled with high fashion and high society, Palm Beach can seem like Manhattan but with palm trees. So it’s no surprise that New York-area real estate firms have gobbled up space there to compete for a constant stream of New Yorkers flying south to find second, third and fourth homes. Two of New York’s premier brokerages, Brown Harris Stevens and Corcoran, have operations there. Another with New York ties, Fite Shavell, formed two years ago and jumped to the top ranks of Palm Beach’s real estate world. Cofounder Wade Shavell opened the firm after helping launch Corcoran’s Palm Beach branch. He was joined by former Prudential Douglas Elliman CFO David Fite. [more]

From the South Florida website: It’s that time of year again, when the temperature falls and the northern snowbirds come down South to roost. Brokers say they’re seeing increased movement in the snowbird sector early on in the season especially from Canadian buyers, with the season already a few weeks underway.  “We’re certainly seeing increased activity, with more buyers coming through,” said Bill Yahn, the Corcoran Group’s regional senior vice president for South Florida. “It’s manifesting itself in all the markets we serve.” While snowbirds — Northerners who have second homes or long-term vacations in Florida for the winter — tend to look for homes in a fairly broad range of prices, right now it’s the higher end that’s seeing the most interest. [more]

While some business owners flock to Manhattan for retail space, a new group of retailers is picking the warm environs of Palm Beach, instead. New York-based sisters and entrepreneurs Lisa Renk and Kim Dryer are launching their first retail outpost outside of the city, following the Worth Avenue debut for fashion
designers Mark Badgley and James Mischka in the fall in Palm Beach. Renk and Dryer own a New
York-based jewelry firm, Sequin. The store will open at 330 S. County Road,
the first retail store for the company. The jewelers, and other like-minded business owners, said that the location offers year-round business. [Palm Beach Daily News]

While a tough 2009 made people reset their expectations, Pamela Liebman, the Corcoran Group’s president and CEO, told the Palm Beach Daily News she thinks the number of transactions nationwide will likely rise this year, though the dollar volume will not. Palm Beach, in particular, has been slow to recover. “It still feels the drag of the overall housing glut in Florida,” Liebman said. Her near-term outlook for Palm Beach and Delray Beach, however, is upbeat. Corcoran, which was the listing broker for the 2009 record $24 million sale of La Bellucia mansion and is also marketing Bernard Madoff’s five-bedroom Palm Beach home, has worked on getting buyers and sellers on the same page. “I think for a long time in all of our markets, whether it was Palm Beach or the Hamptons or New York City, there was a lot of talk about people wanting luxury and ‘the biggest’ and ‘the best’ — the biggest apartment, the best views, the most oceanfront,” Liebman, 47, said. “People are buying properties again for themselves to enjoy, not to make a statement about their life and how much money they have.” Liebman, who said she stays in her Miami home at least twice a month, said that international buyers — many from South America and Russia — are in the market, as are Europeans “but not as strong as they were.”
[Palm Beach Daily News]

Bernard Madoff and his former penthouse apartment at 133 East 64th Street

Bernie Madoff’s Upper East Side penthouse may be close to finding a buyer. Brokers asking to show Madoff’s former
home at 133 East 64th Street have been told that there is an accepted
offer on the property, sources said. The seized co-op,
which is being sold by the United States Marshals Service, is
currently listed by Sotheby’s International Realty brokers Anne Corey
and Serena Boardman for $8.9 million after a $1 million price chop in November. The property was listed as having an accepted offer in at least one
brokerage’s internal listing system Thursday afternoon. But Roland Ubaldo, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service, said
the brokers are negotiating with potential buyers and that the
property is still being shown. Corey and Boardman were not immediately available for comment. Madoff’s former Montauk home recently sold for $9.4 million.
[more]

From the South Florida Web site: For
a third time this year, the Palm Beach office of the Corcoran Group,
looking for ways to move mansions in a slow market, brokered a deal so
that two clients could swap mansions for an even $6 million. “Trading
houses is a creative solution in this market,” said Bill Yahn, director
of sales for Corcoran in Palm Beach. The swap earlier this month is an
extreme example of how to get business going when the market is nearly
moribund, he said. “Swapping is a way to get the maximum values, the
highest and best price in a market where there are no takers.” Yahn
said they have only done swaps when both homes are local and both
parties are working “internally with Corcoran.” [more]

Brokers are particularly interested in Bernard Madoff’s (left) Montauk home (right, source: East Hampton Star)

Before Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years for fraud yesterday,
the courts began liquidating his real estate portfolio to pay back his
victims. On Friday, three days before Madoff received his sentence, Judge Denny
Chin for the Southern District of New York ruled that U.S. Marshals
could begin selling seized Madoff homes around the world. He and his wife, Ruth, have properties on the Upper East Side and in the Hamptons, Palm Beach, Fla., and France. One property that is generating considerable interest, particularly in
the broker community, is a beachfront getaway in the Montauk section of
the Hamptons that sits unusually close to the ocean and has had
only one previous owner, making details of its layout and appearance
something of a mystery. [more]

From the South Florida Web site: A multimillion-dollar mansion
sale last week brought the extent of the housing crash home to the very
highest end of the South Florida market. Prices, expectations and
declining property values all played a role in the 40 percent discount
reached in the sale of the Palm Beach Island home of William and Sarah
Farish, politically connected prominent Kentucky horse breeders, who
last week accepted $8.38 million for their mansion at the southern end
of the island. Some realtors gulped when they did the math on the sale.
James Orthwein Jr., a trustee of the James B. Orthwein Jr. Revocable
Trust and a scion of the St. Louis Busch family, paid $5.57 million
less than the asking price of $13.95 million. The comments reveal as
much about the alternate reality of the luxury property market as the
sale itself. [more]