Interview With Ivanka Trump

I.T.: Absolutely. You're not bidding against 50 other people. You know, there's no access to capital, and if you have the capital available, there are incredible deals to be made. We're buying golf courses left and right across the country. I think large commercial assets will soon start to become available. There are just great deals to be made, and these are the times people should be buying. If you have the ability to do so, which is a big "if."

L.G.: Just out of curiosity, has your father told you just how horrible and scary it was when he went through his huge crisis back in the '90s? And what was the lesson from that?

I.T.: My father very much reinforces all of the lessons that he learned. He was really on the brink, and I respect him incredibly for the fight he put up to not suffer the same fate as many of his colleagues, which was ultimately bankruptcy. He made it through it without having to declare bankruptcy, despite being in a very precarious situation, and he remembered those times, and he never wants to go back there.

L.G.: Do you think you inherited the nerves of steel that are necessary in those situations?

I.T.: I certainly hope so. We'll see, right? Nobody knows. Everyone talks a big game until you're in that moment, but there are a lot of people who just don't—they don't physically have the stomach to continue to fight in these really challenging times, and that's unfortunate. It's purely his stamina and his fight that got him through, and I hope that I've inherited that. I'd like to think that I did, but we'll see.

L.G.: Walk me through briefly what the Trump Organization has in terms of buildings and projects.

I.T.: Well, we have 70 projects in our active pipeline, and we have more than that that are actually constructed. I don't know what the exact number is. We're a private company with the exception of the gaming company.

L.G.: And you're on the board of the gaming company.

I.T.: I am. I'm apparently the youngest director on a publicly traded company, somebody just told me that the other week. I thought that was sort of funny. I'm 26.

L.G.: Really—getting long in the tooth, aren't we?

I.T.: I know, look at that.

L.G.: So you have 70 things in the pipeline or coming to fruition.

I.T.: They adopt, they're really hybrid in nature. Some of them are pure hotels, some of them are resort hotels. We have an incredible project under construction in Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic, whereby we have an incredible horizontal resort hotel, golf course, and then residential villas. Then we have the classic condominium vertical tower, urban tower, we have hybrids, hotel condominium with commercial components, we have pure commercial buildings. We have a project in Turkey right now with our partners Dogan. They're Turkey's largest conglomerate, phenomenal partners, and it's a mixed-use building with one residential tower, one commercial tower, and 400,000 square feet of luxury retail space at the base.

L.G.: Tell me which projects that you brought in and how you hear about things.

I.T.: I've worked on all the new construction projects, but normally my brothers and I are involved in the initial vetting of the deals. Sometimes it's reactionary, whereby people bring us the opportunities or they're looking for an operator from a hotel perspective. Other times we identify markets that we're very bullish on, and we'll actively travel to those places and meet with the Donald Trumps, if you will, of those areas. So we're very active right now in China, we're very active in India, really educating ourselves on the lay of the land, identifying the markets that are most strategically important for us to enter.

L.G.: What are your criteria? What makes things attractive to you in those markets?

I.T.: Obviously you look for growth and you look for basic stability. You also have to look at the price point that you can sell for, even if you're selling for a premium of 50 percent to market, which is not unusual, especially when we enter emerging markets. In Panama, we sold at a 500 percent premium to anything the luxury market has ever experienced prior to our entry. Even in Hawaii, a year and a half ago, we sold $729 million worth of real estate in six hours—10 percent hard deposit for a 50 percent premium to luxury market. Very sizable premiums relative to the high-end luxury competition in those markets.

L.G.: That day is gone.

I.T.: Well, yeah, but we have projects that are actively selling. We've brought our residential tower in Turkey to market in the middle of the summer, which is never a great time to introduce products, but we were ready to go, and we already have 75 percent of the building under contract at very high price per square foot relative to the market. So our commercial tower in that building is 100 percent leased, and we haven't even officially gone out with our leasing materials for that commercial tower. It was just based on interest, and it was literally reactionary to the demand of people who wanted office space in Trump Towers Istanbul. So we have many projects that are actively selling. I sold 40 units in Panama last month. It's a 1,000-unit building, we've sold over 90 percent of it.