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T HINK B IG

PRINCIPLE 4: CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
LEADS TO BIG PROFITS

In my 20 years of representing major estate developers before I met
Donald Trump I earned my reputation as a problem solver, and it’s one
of the reasons he hired me. It has been the key to my success in real es-
tate and in law, and I encourage every small real estate investor to
think of real estate problems, especially in the acquisition stage, as
“opportunities.” In fact, Donald and I both tend to view things that
are considered “impossible” by other experts, as simply taking longer.
This is what happened on the Commodore Hotel deal I described in
Chapter 1, and this common perspective has been one of the founda-
tions of our work together. We became a formidable combination that
still exists today.
As I mentioned, one of the things I learned from working with New
York real estate mogul Sol Goldman, is that “every problem has a price
tag.” Many small real estate investors are intimidated by problems, but
to entrepreneurial minds like Trump’s, a problem is like a key to the
vault—a reason to get an even lower price on a building. Some of
Trump’s biggest profits have come from properties he bought cheap be-
cause they had complex problems nobody had been able to solve. After
he solved the problem, he reaped millions of dollars in profits (40 Wall
Street, which I discuss in Chapter 3, is a good example). Ambitious real
estate investors should look at a problem property (provided it can be
bought at a correspondingly large discount) as a great opportunity.
Unfortunately, lawyers are too often trained to kill deals when
problems arise, rather than translating legal problems and risks into fi-
nancial terms,sothatabusiness decision can be made. Many times real
estate deals run into problems that can only be solved with creative,
“out-of-the-box” thinking. That’s how Donald and I put together a
deal that brought Niketown to a prime location in New York City.

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