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P RINCIPLES OF N EGOTIA TION

Trump said to me, “George, I’m thinking of turning 40 Wall Street
into co-op units, because that’s what everybody else is doing. I
want you to analyze the situation and tell me what you think I
should do.”
A number of well-known brokers had analyzed the building and
determined that there were no tenants looking for office space down-
town. They said that even if the office rental market improved, the
higher floors were too small to be attractive, and the lower floors
contained huge columns that interfered with efficient space usage.
Their sentiments were unanimous: “It will never work as an office
building even if by some miracle the market for downtown office
space improves.”
But there was a major roadblock to residential conversion. Before
any workcouldbecommencedadealwouldhavetobemadewith
theseven-floor law firm to give up their lease. Based on my exten-
sive experience in dealing with holdouts and knowing the principals
of the law firm, I knew this would be a time-consuming and expen-
sive settlement.
Not satisfied with the advice of others to turn the building into co-
op apartments, I did my own analysis and about a week later I went to
Donald and said, “I studied the best use of the building and came to
the conclusion that it actually can work as an office building. The ex-
perts have been taking the wrong approach and reached the wrong
conclusion. You don’t have one office building, you have three. They
just happen to be on top of each other. You have 400,000 square feet
of small office space on the top portion of the building. I don’t care
what the others say; I think that’s rentable at $17 per square foot
(which was $2 per square foot over the average market rent) because
a tenant will have the prestige of renting an entire floor, and a fantas-
tic view of New York harbor.”
IalsotoldhimthatIworked out the financial projections based on
his total cost of acquisition and renovation. I concluded that: “If we
cantake the 400,000 square feet at the top of the building and rent it
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