15
His First Success in Real Estate
Donald’s father had often profited from buying properties that were
in foreclosure. In this situation, an owner is unable to make mortgage
payments on a loan for a home or other piece of property. The bank
that made the loan can then seize the property and offer it to another
buyer. Foreclosures are often a good bargain since banks usually want
to sell the seized property as quickly as possible. Like his father, Donald
saw ways to profit from the purchase of foreclosures. As he explains,
“In college, while my friends were reading the comics and the sports
pages of newspapers, I was reading listings of . . . foreclosures.”
10
One
of these listings Donald discovered was for a troubled apartment com-
plex in Cincinnati called Swifton Village. The complex, built in 1962,
had twelve hundred apartments but eight hundred were vacant, and the
owners had gone bankrupt.
In 1964 Donald convinced his father to buy Swifton Village for
$6 million, half of what it had cost to build the complex. Donald was
put in charge of restoring the property. In
The Art of the Deal,
Trump
describes the complex as a total disaster and lays blame for that condi-
tion on the renters:
The tenants who were living in the project when I took over
had ripped the place apart. Many of them had come down from
the hills of Kentucky. They were very poor and had seven or
eight children, almost no possessions, and no experience liv-
ing in an apartment complex. They crammed into one-room
and two-room apartments, and their children just went wild.
They would just destroy the apartments and wreak havoc on
the property.
11
Many of the renters were forced out when Trump raised the rent sub-
stantially. With most apartments now empty, the Trumps invested
around $800,000 in building improvements, including cleaning, paint-
ing, and remodeling. Within a year all of the apartments were rented to
