Trump's true apprentices: his two children

Be creative
Don recalls how his father found a clever way to add 12,000 square feet of space to the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue, which he converted to high-end condos. Built in 1929, the building had 200 suites, suitable as hotel rooms but lacking the square footage that the target buyers would demand. The zoning code forbade adding any square feet to the property. Trump told his son: “If you go by the status quo, you’ll never get anything done.”

Trump, who’d purchased the property for $115 million and was spending $85 million on renovations, wanted to add space by extending the building’s upper floors. So he gutted 12,000 square feet of old commercial space at the structure’s base, leaving open dirt beneath a corner of the building away from the street.

Then, putting a twist on the sort of trade that is common in New York zoning, he transferred the space upstairs to make bigger apartments by erecting a steel-and-glass extension above the existing roof. All units at what now is called Trump Park Avenue are sold except for the penthouse, priced at $32 million.

Use the media
Although Donald Trump on occasion gets trashed in the press, most recently for the casino bankruptcy, he is a master at generating positive publicity. “We can do a building in the middle of nowhere, and it makes national news,” says Don. He and Ivanka spend hours on the phone with reporters in cities where new Trump properties are being developed.

Know your timbers
The elder Trump is a perfectionist. For years he has lectured the kids on what was right and wrong with buildings. On one recent Saturday morning Donald Trump visited the construction site of his housing development, one of the few undertakings he owns 100 percent and for which he is putting up all the money. It adjoins his seaside golf course in Palos Verdes, Calif., south of Los Angeles.

Trump and his construction managers look over samples of patio bricks for the driveways. Then they go into the master bedroom of one of the houses. Ivanka, Trump is told, toured this house yesterday and said a window should be moved to get a better view. “She’s right,” Trump says.

Another Trump project is rising in Jersey City, N.J., a once dowdy industrial burg that’s now rallying. New Jersey developers Dean Geibel and Paul Fried are shouldering the $415 million cost of the twin-tower condo structure. Called Trump Plaza and due to open in 2008, it promises to be the tallest residential building in the state.

Don Jr. is on the phone with Geibel about the construction work at least twice a week. Originally Geibel wanted the building to have “eyebrows,” concrete slabs on each floor that poke out from the exterior walls, dividing the facade into one-story sections. But Don convinced him that these protrusions disguised the complex’s height, its big selling point. Eliminating the eyebrows, Don argued, would add just $2 per square foot to the construction cost of $400.

Once all the units sell, the Trumps will stay on as property managers. After all, their name is on the building.

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