Trump Defense Witness Valued Mar-a-Lago at More Than $1 Billion — With a Big Caveat

A Florida-based real estate broker testified on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property was worth more than $1 billion in 2021.

Palm Beach-based real estate broker Lawrence Moens’s projections of Mar-a-Lago for every year before then stretching back a decade largely eclipsed Trump’s own projections on statements of financial condition. 

The projection, however, came with a significant asterisk: Moens’s valuation assumes that Mar-a-Lago is a personal residence, a premise that a judge already has rejected in Trump’s ongoing civil fraud trial.

New York Attorney General Letitia James noted that Trump’s 2002 deed swore off the use of Mar-a-Lago as anything but a private club. In a pre-trial ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron agreed, and that distinction significantly limited the scope of Moens’s testimony. 

A Mar-a-Lago member and longtime Trump associate, Moens said that he became the premiere broker for properties in Palm Beach after dropping out of high school in the ninth grade. Moens said that he built his business “on a wing and a prayer,” quoting Thomas Jefferson to explain why he entered the real estate industry.

"The basis of all true wealth is in the land," Moens said. 

Describing his relationship to Trump as “cordial,” Moens asserted that no other broker sells more in Palm Beach-area real estate than he does, and he projected those sales as billions of dollars a year. The attorney general’s attorney Kevin Wallace noted that this real estate practice focuses primarily on private residences.

Asked if he ever sold a private club, Moens agreed that he had not, and the state asked to limit the scope of his expertise to valuing personal residences. The judge allowed him to offer opinions on what Mar-a-Lago would be if it had no limitations as a private club. 

Describing the property as “breathtaking,” Moens said: “It’s something amazing to see.”

To demonstrate, Moens created a video of Mar-a-Lago, offering sweeping panoramas from outside and inside the property, overlaid with a triumphant soundtrack of piano and string instruments. The Trump family’s attorney Clifford Robert played the video in open court. 

When Moens sat for a pre-trial deposition earlier this year, he claimed that Trump’s valuations of Mar-a-Lago between $426,529,614 and $612,110,496, from 2011 and 2021, were too conservative. His projections show him valuing the property hundreds of thousands of dollars more every year for roughly a decade.

“I could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between,” Moens testified in July. “Kings, emperors, heads of state. But with net worths in the multiple billions. I don't know how many people in the world have a net worth of more than $10 billion, but I think it's quite a number. There are a lot."

In a scathing footnote of a pre-trial ruling in September, the judge wrote: ““Obviously, this Court cannot consider an ‘expert affidavit’ that is based on unexplained and unsubstantiated ‘dream[s].’”

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys called attorney John K. Shubin to back their arguments that Mar-a-Lago could be used as a personal residence. Moens testimony will continue on Tuesday afternoon.