Trump international golf club puerto rico rates: Trump International Golf Club – Puerto Rico • Tee times and Reviews

Not Such A Great Deal : NPR

Trump’s Puerto Rico Golf Venture: Not Such A Great Deal President Trump seems pessimistic about Puerto Rico’s ability to pay its debts. That view may, in part, reflect his own financial experience there, where he once got stung by a golf course bankruptcy.

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Politics

October 5, 20175:01 AM ET

Just two years ago, a former Trump International Golf Club in Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy. The insolvency filing came less than a month after Trump had announced he would run for president, basing his qualifications on his skills as a businessman.

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Just two years ago, a former Trump International Golf Club in Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy. The insolvency filing came less than a month after Trump had announced he would run for president, basing his qualifications on his skills as a businessman.

Michael Cohen/Getty Images

Ever since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico last month, President Trump has been pointing out the commonwealth’s “massive debt,” as he has put it.

And then on Tuesday on Fox News, he warned Puerto Rico’s investors that “you can say goodbye” to the debt issued by the battered U.S. territory.

It wasn’t clear exactly what Trump meant by that. But the president’s views on Puerto Rico’s troubles may have been informed by his own experiences there. Not long ago, he himself ended up on the wrong side of a bet on Puerto Rico’s financial health.

Just two years ago, a former Trump International Golf Club in Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy. The insolvency filing came less than a month after Trump had announced he would run for president, basing his qualifications on his skills as a businessman.

But those skills were sorely tested in Puerto Rico. Here’s what happened, starting a decade ago:

Back in 2007, the Trump Organization began a business relationship with the 36-hole, oceanfront club. The owners brought in Trump in hopes of making the four-year-old enterprise thrive, using the New York businessman’s brand name and management services.

Once in a Bloomberg interview, Trump’s son Eric Trump emphasized that the family had never had ownership stake in the property. “We have zero financial investment in this course,” he said. “This is a separate owner. We purely manage the golf course.”

It may have sounded good at the time. But at least in retrospect, it seems the Trump family should have seen that the deal was coming with a red warning flag.

Puerto Rico had lost a powerful economic driver the previous year: the so-called Section 936 federal tax write-off for companies with money-earning subsidiaries on the island. The tax shelter had been especially popular with the pharmaceutical industry.

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So by the time the club and the Trump Organization were first joining forces, Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate was already climbing. It rose from 10.6 percent in March 2008 to an eventual peak of 17 percent in May 2010.

In fact, between 2007 and 2015, the island had just one year of economic growth.

Initially, the Trump-branded club did try to make a splash despite the tough economy. In 2008, it hosted the PGA Puerto Rico Open, and used the tournament to kick-start the condo sales.

“This is clearly going to be a world-class resort,” Trump told Florida Golf Magazine at the time. “I never had a project with so much ocean-front.”

The magazine quoted Eric Trump as saying, “The PGA tournament served as the ideal platform to debut this one-of-a-kind project to such an important audience.”

In fact, it was not all that unusual. The club fit a formula Trump regularly uses: golf plus branding, with high-end residential mixed in. One recent example is the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai — an extravagant 18-hole course and 100 luxury villas.

But compared with Dubai, there was a big difference: the Puerto Rico club was built on a weak financial structure. The privately owned golf course got a government development bank to issue $16. 2 million in bonds in 2000. The project took longer and cost more than planned, leading to a $7.5 million bond issue in 2004.

So it really needed to take off in 2008 to live up to all of its financial obligations, but instead, it kept losing money.

From 2008 to 2012, it lost between $5.8 million and $7.2 million annually. In 2012 it had just 63 members, and only four had bought condo units. Mainland players weren’t flocking to Coco Beach, and revenues from the Puerto Rico Open were steadily declining.

Throughout those rocky years, the Trump Organization was doing its usual thing: creating six corporate entities to handle the club management and the branding, and naming Ivanka Trump as vice president, as noted in her White House financial disclosure report. The club’s 2012 annual report shows it paid Trump 4.5 percent of its gross annual revenues — $609,607 total for the five years from 2008 to 2012. But the report doesn’t show what Trump was spending on its operations there.

In 2011, the club’s debt got rolled together in a refinancing for $26.4 million. All along, the deal had resembled the U.S. housing crisis — i.e., it had a balloon mortgage, with small, interest-only payments for the first several years.

The re-fi didn’t help. In 2012, the club defaulted, and for the next three years, its debt payments were made by Puerto Rico’s Tourism Development Fund, which was guaranteeing the bonds.

In 2015, the Trump partnership ended. The club reverted to its original name — the Coco Beach Golf and Country Club — and filed for bankruptcy. It claimed $9.2 million in assets and $78.1 million in liabilities: $32.6 million in bonds and $45.5 million to other creditors. The Tourism Development Fund sought to recover $32.1 million in principal and interest on the bonds.

Much further down the list, Trump International Golf Club at Coco Beach claimed $690,339 in unpaid management fees.

The bankruptcy files don’t indicate whether Trump’s company ever recovered its claim. The Trump Organization didn’t respond to NPR inquiries.

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The Island Resort That Trump Promised To Save (But So Didn’t)

Donald Trump claimed he had a plan to save a failing Puerto Rican golf resort: He would streamline its budget and attract new members. Those promises, repeated for years, helped the club sell a raft of government-backed bonds that it had very little chance of repaying.

Trump collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from the resort, but he never did oversee the golf course’s daily operations. He didn’t attract more than a handful of new members or reduce its multimillion-dollar annual losses. Its costly, self-dealing contracts remained in place. In late 2011, six months after selling the bonds, the club defaulted, leaving Puerto Rican taxpayers — already suffering through a major economic crisis — on the hook for as much as $32.7 million, according to an analysis by the Securities Litigation and Consulting Group.

The Trump family distanced itself from the project’s failure, claiming that the real estate developer merely licensed his name to the property. But a review of hundreds of pages of corporate and legal filings, undertaken by BuzzFeed News, shows that Trump promised the club’s investors and the government of Puerto Rico something entirely different.

As Trump enters the home stretch of a presidential campaign boasting about his shrewd business sense and his “unbelievable company,” the failure of the Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico offers an unusually stark example of some strategies by which he advanced: leveraging his name to attract starry-eyed investors, making all-but-impossible promises, and risking public resources without significant investment of his own.

The Trump Organization declined to comment on the project; the resort’s developers, the Díaz family, best known for owning the road-building business Betterroads Asphalt, did not respond to requests for comment left with their main business, Empresas Díaz.

The two courses of what was first named the Coco Beach Golf & Country Club cover a peninsula on the island’s northeast corner, near the El Yunque rainforest. The surrounding resort includes a luxury hotel, timeshares, and the Trump Founders Residences, condos whose buyers are required to join the golf club.

The resort was built with ample support from the Puerto Rican government. Its tourism agency agreed to cover losses on $18 million in bonds sold in 2000 and another $7.5 million in 2004. The government also invested $50 million to support the hotel — a crucial source of paying customers for the golf club, though not nearly enough to break even.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars ended up back in the hands of the Díaz family, which built and owned the resort. The family’s asphalt company provided construction and helped arrange financing; a separate utility that they owned treated wastewater from the resort. The utility had no experience, no other clients, and no way to cover its losses without the owners’ help.

Amid a tough and worsening tourist economy, the club’s losses piled up, and its developer loaned the project millions to keep it afloat. So in 2008, the resort turned to an outside expert, one known for owning and managing top-flight golf courses.

At the beginning of that year, Donald Trump signed two deals. The first, a licensing agreement, allowed developers to rename the club as Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico. The second, a management agreement, positioned Trump to handle the club’s operations in exchange for a share of its annual revenue and a separate slice of any profit it produced.

In effect, Trump was guaranteed income even if the project lost money; by the end of 2012, he had claimed more than $600,000.

According to the project’s annual reports, Trump had developed a plan to increase membership and cut costs, helping the club to become profitable at last. Trump repeated the promise each year, according to the reports.

The club got a boost in visibility when, in 2008, it started hosting Puerto Rico’s only PGA Tour event, the Puerto Rico Open. Financially, however, little changed at the resort in Trump’s first three years as manager. Yet in 2011, when the company returned to seek government support for another round of financing, it presented Trump’s plans as central to the project’s future prospects, according to official documents used to market the bonds to investors

The club’s viability — and, therefore, the likelihood that it would repay the bonds without government help — depended on its ability to attract customers and limit its spending, investors were told. Trump, as manager, “has developed a plan to achieve and maintain positive operating cash flows sufficient” to keep the doors open, according to the official offering document. “In particular, the Club Manager has developed programs to attract members and use the Club, while containing operating costs,” it said.

Throughout the bond offering, Trump is positioned as crucial to the club’s hoped-for turnaround. “The Borrower will rely on the Club Manager [Trump] to manage the Project,” one section header reads. Another passage, however, suggests that Trump’s involvement in the project was limited. Trump currently worked “in consultation” with the owners but did not handle day-to-day operations of the club, the document said.

To Craig McCann, of the Securities Litigation and Consulting Group, who has testified in cases involving Puerto Rico municipal bonds, Trump’s promise to put the club in the black was “ridiculous on its face.” McCann wondered “how this statement can be made repeatedly when the resort had huge negative cash flows every year from 2008 when Trump took over to 2012 and beyond.”

“If it could plausibly be made in 2008 it could only be made recklessly without regard to the truth of the statement after years of revenue stuck well below $3 million and operating expenses of $7 million,” McCann continued. “That doesn’t come close to positive cash flow.”

Investors bit. But the turnaround did not happen. At the end of 2012, the club had 63 members, up from 50 when Trump took over, but still not nearly enough to cover expenses. Its yearly operating loss averaged $5.3 million in the two years before Trump signed on; from his arrival through 2012, the figure rose to $6.3 million.

About six months after the bonds were sold, the resort starting missing payments, citing “financial difficulties.” The project limped along with the government repaying bondholders and the resort owner continuing to lend it millions to cover losses. The company also quietly sought to unload the resort, according to bankruptcy filings last year. But no buyers emerged.

Last July, after 11 years of losses, the Coco Beach club filed for bankruptcy protection. Responding to an inquiry from Bloomberg News, Eric Trump minimized his father’s role in the mess. “This has absolutely nothing to do with Trump,” he said. “This is a separate owner. We purely manage the golf course.”

The Díaz family valued the two golf courses at only $1 million in bankruptcy filings — a fraction of the roughly $50 million value they had attached to the property a few years earlier in annual reports. And they proposed selling most of the golf club’s assets to OHorizons Global LLC, for just $2.2 million.

The Coco Beach club was one of many wobbly companies with which the territorial government cast its lot. As failed investments like this one drained its coffers, Puerto Rico had to cut spending across nearly every government department while raising taxes and retirement ages. The island’s unemployment now stands at 12.6%.

Today, the club operates under its original name: Coco Beach Golf & Country Club. Bankruptcy court erased much of its debt to the government. And the new owners were able to reverse years of poor maintenance within months, enabling it to retain the PGA tournament.

In March, the ninth annual Puerto Rico Open was held, as it has been every year, at the spruced-up Coco Beach golf club that once bore Trump’s name.

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Trump paid $28 million for another golf club

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Donald Trump owns a collection of the best golf courses in the world. Yesterday it was replenished with another club in the state of New Jersey.

Created by a famous American golfer, the 182-hectare Shadow Isle club initially attracted 100 investors who invested $200,000 in the project. However, later, due to financial problems and unfavorable press coverage, sales of membership in the club stopped.
The developer will receive $28 million from the new deal with Donald Trump. The billionaire intends to involve the world’s best golf course architect Tom Fazio in the project. Trump said that after the reconstruction is completed, this club will become one of the best in the world. The famed developer also intends to rename the club from its new owner, Trump National Golf Club/Colts Neck.

In addition to this novelty, Trump owns golf clubs in Westchester, Los Angeles, Palm Beach and Puerto Rico, New York Post reports.

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Trump opened a luxury golf course in Dubai – golf news

russianemirates.com, 2/20/17

Trump International Golf Club Dubai at Damac Hills, owned by companies of the 45th President of the United States Donald Trump opened on Saturday in Dubai.

Donald Trump. GI

Trump International Golf Club Dubai is his first real estate project since inauguration. The President’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. arrived at the official opening. Trump’s partner was construction giant Damac.

Eric Trump noted that this is “probably the best golf club in the Middle East.” As Bloomberg clarifies, to become a member of the club you need to pay 15 thousand dollars and then pay another about 22 thousand annually.

The golf club is designed by American architect Gil Hanse, who designed the golf course for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The club is part of the $6 billion Damac Hills luxury residential development project implemented by Damac.

Damac reportedly announced its first deal with the billionaire’s companies in May 2013. Other projects that were made public later also dealt with real estate. However, in January of this year, the developer confirmed that Donald Trump’s Trump Organization companies had abandoned further joint projects totaling $2 billion.

Meanwhile, Trump World Golf Club Dubai, which is currently under construction and designed by golfer Tiger Woods, will soon follow the first golf project.

Damac Hills consists of more than 4,000 luxury villas and 7,500 residential units in condominiums surrounding the golf course, as well as hospitality, luxury shopping, spa and wellness, entertainment, restaurants and cafes.

Donald Trump himself last visited Dubai in 2014.

Donald Trump and Jack Nicklaus congratulate Tiger Woods on his victory