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S ELL Y OURSELF L IKE T RUMP

Now you have information that may help you establish rapport
with the owner, and probably some ammunition that will be useful
when you enter into negotiations.

SHOWMANSHIP ISA REAL ESTATE STRATEGY

Once you have conviction about how your real estate investment
can benefit not just you but the other people whose help you need,
and you’ve started to build relationships, the next step is to find
concrete ways to communicate your vision to your potential real es-
tate partners. Anyone who is involved with a real estate transaction,
especially a fixer-upper project or new construction, has undoubt-
edly spent a lot of time and effort thinking about the details of it:
how it will work, why it will be good for everyone involved, how it
will be successful, and what the end reward will be. The challenge
now is to condense everything that you’ve done and thought into
something that you can show or tell other people so that they get
the same degree of enthusiasm. It’s difficult, but that’s your chal-
lenge. Keep in mind that other people whose help you need are
starting off cold. They haven’t spent the weeks or the months living
with this project that you have. To get them to share in your
dream, you have to come up with a way of making it interesting to
them. This is called showmanship—and it is one of Trump’s signa-
ture traits.
One great example of Trump’s showmanship was his hiring of
Henry Pearce, a dignified, New York City banker with decades of
experience, to assist him in obtaining the financing for the Com-
modore. Trump was only 27 and he knew bankers would be skepti-
cal of lending so much money to someone so young. Showmanship,
in this case, meant conveying a powerful symbol of reliability and

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