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Lenders foreclosed this week on the site for the oft-delayed Trump Towers Atlanta, which was getting the Trumponian sales push three years ago.
The land for the project could be sold at auction as early as next month, according to local press reports.
Hailed as The Donald’s first foray into Atlanta, the first phase of the project featured a 48-story tower with 360 condominium units, priced between $500,000 and $1.6 million. In 2007, “after just weeks since the opening” of the sales center, the Trump Towers Atlanta was “nearly one-third sold,” a press release proclaimed. Construction was set to begin in 2007 with a grand opening planned for 2020.
In May of 2008, the developers said 90 units had been sold and the project was scheduled to complete “in the second quarter of 2010.” Last October, Trumpling executive Ivanka Trump told a radio station, “There will be Trump Towers in Atlanta in very short order,” adding that construction would begin “within a year.”
But executives with the project not named Trump have been more willing to acknowledge the problems with the market. Towers with thousands of condo units planned for downtown Atlanta have either been delayed or cancelled.
“I think even if we had a giant pot of money, we wouldn’t start construction until a lot of the supply in Midtown had been absorbed,” Bennett Sands, a partner in the project, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution last summer. “It’s just not prudent to add condo inventory into that market right now. The start of that project is a long way off at this point.”
Apparently Ivanka Trump didn’t get the memo before she promised a Trump Towers Atlanta “in short order.”
The project is listed as a joint venture of the Trump Organization, Wood Partners (Sands’ company) and Dezer Properties, making it difficult to determine the real extent of Trump’s involvement. (Trump’s willingness to license his name to projects has caused problems for his reputation lately.)
At this point, there is still little detail about the foreclosure. And, of course, this doesn’t mean the development is dead. But the foreclosure doesn’t bode well for the project, even though the Trump Organization’s Web site still labels Trump Towers Atlanta as “currently in development.”
