Woman From China Said to Be Mystery Buyer of Trump Childhood Home

Trump Birth House LLC spent $2.14M for the Jamaica Estates abode
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 29, 2017 10:07 AM CDT

Someone has agreed to hand over $2.14 million for President Trump's childhood home in Queens—and an unnamed neighbor tells the New York Times she's witnessed suited-up people pulling up to the Jamaica Estates home in black luxury SUVs and speaking Chinese since the secretive deal went down. She says she wants to know why they're so keen on the president's boyhood residence, built by his father. "What do they want?" she muses. Although the LLC that bought the Tudor-style abode at auction is listed as "Trump Birth House," someone who's said to know details of the deal tells the Times the buyer behind the LLC is a Chinese woman. "Trump is a very popular kind of character in China," a New York real estate agent says, noting she's not surprised someone with ties to that country would purchase the home.

DNAinfo documents the home's paper trail over the past decade or so: It was first purchased by a married couple in 2008 for close to $800,000, then sold to a real estate investor for nearly $1.4 million in December—meaning he made about three-quarters of a million dollars on his quick flip. The owner of the realty group that closed the deal last week says the lucrativeness of such a transaction is the "perfect example of why special properties are appropriately sold by auction, just like art is." Meanwhile, in Trump Tower, a woman who owns an apartment there was fined $1,000 by the city for advertising her 30th-floor digs for rent through Airbnb, Quartz reports. Lena Yelagina was hit with the penalty due to a recently passed NYC law barring ads that rent out a full apartment for fewer than 30 days. (There's been some grumbling about Melania Trump choosing to stick around NYC for now.)

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