No. of Recommendations: 7
We're going to disagree here. Land is valued separately for a reason, which is why I showed you the vacant lot literally down the road. Land is the starting point for what someone plans to do with the lot. In the case of MaL and the other place down the A1A they're in similar geographic and economic zones so the land values should be similar.As a general matter, yes - but not when you have restrictions on the property. Having more land typically makes a property more useful - especially for property that can be redeveloped and subdivided. Six acres is often twice as good as three acres, because usually you can simply develop
two of whatever you would do on the three acres. More land gives you more options.
But Mar-a-Lago isn't like that. It's completely fixed. There's the main mansion, and it can't be significantly altered. Trump tried back in the 1990's - he wanted to tear it down and build houses, and the City refused to let him. The ability to have a private club was a concession, because keeping up a 66K historic mansion was a money pit - but they limited the number of memberships, and the income stream from that is basically not going to be much more than the cost of upkeep and operations.
So if you look at the Mar-a-Lago property, nearly all of it is just empty green area and parking. You can't
do anything with that extra land. The house is setback
seven hundred feet from the waterfront, but you can't build any additional structures there because you'll wreck the views. That's more than half the property.
https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/chasewitho...If you
scraped Mar-a-Lago, you might get closer to $75 million for the raw land. A billionaire could come in, build-to-suit an actual residential compound (right-sized main house of maybe a dozen bedrooms, several guest houses and accessory structures) with everything in the right places. But being stuck with having to preserve the Mar-a-Lago building itself? I doubt you'd get all that much more than the $37 million which is the current valuation.
