Here's your chance to buy Donald Trump's childhood home
The house at 85-15 Wareham Place in Queens, New York, lacks the gilded furniture, glittering chandeliers and other over-the-top opulence of Donald Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse or $200 million Mar-a-Lago estate, but it may have a greater historical significance for the Republican presidential nominee: It’s where he got his start in life.
The brick-and-stucco mock-Tudor property can be yours, too – but you’ll probably have to wait until after the presidential election next month, as the auction has been postponed.
The two-story Tudor-style home in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens was to hit the auction block Wednesday evening with an opening bid of $849,000, but Paramount Realty, which coordinated the auction, says the sellers decided they wanted to allow prospective bidders more time to evaluate the property.
Paramount says the auction likely will be held later this year after the election.
Trump’s father, real estate developer Fred Trump, built the house around 1940, said Misha Haghani, managing principal at Paramount Realty USA, which is handling the auction with another local real estate firm. He believes Donald lived there from his birth in 1946 until about 1950. The Trumps later moved around the corner.
The current owners are Manhattan restaurateurs Isaac and Claudia Kestenberg, who bought the property in 2008 for $782,500 and are selling it as part of divorce proceedings.
The dwelling is in the tony Jamaica Estates neighborhood in eastern Queens, which mostly consists of one-family homes that can easily top $2 million.
Despite the leafy environs, the house doesn’t seem to have prompted the kind of bidding wars common in New York City’s inflated housing market. It was originally listed at $1.65 million, but the price was cut to $1.39 million in August.
So what do you get for your money? Certainly, the house is a far cry from the gaudy condos, resorts and other temples of material excess Trump is associated with in his real estate ventures, especially given that his father’s fortune was estimated at $250 million to $350 million when he died in 1999.
But it looks comfortable and homey, perhaps bespeaking a time when even the fabulously wealthy felt a measure of constraint on their consumption. The house has five bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, eat-in-kitchen, formal dining room, fireplace, screened patio, den, finished basement, hardwood floors galore, and a two-car detached garage, among other features. And – head’s up, New Yorkers – nearby access to the city subway system’s E and F trains.
Potential buyers get one more thing that might be near-and-dear to Trump’s heart: proof he lived there. Auction documents include a copy of his birth certificate showing that the home belonged to his parents when he was born.