How Trump Made Millions As Partners Ditched His Brand
Around midnight on August 8, 2017, a group of protestors dressed up in mock Russian military uniforms, marched down Varick and Spring Streets in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood and—while the Russian national anthem played and national flag waved—projected an image of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin giving a thumbs up onto the side of one of Donald Trump's hotels, Trump SoHo. "Happy to help, bro," read text next to the image, alluding to Russian efforts to boost Trump in the 2016 election.
The projections were gone shortly—but just a few months later, so was Trump's name; by the end of the year, the 391-room, 46-story glass spire that towers over neighboring apartment buildings was renamed the Dominick Hotel. The building, which is owned by CIM Group, opened in 2010, and Trump managed it with the same subsidiary that his other Manhattan hotel operates through. But less than a decade later, Trump and the tower owner CIM Group parted ways. "I think it was a combination of things," James Woods, managing partner at a New York commercial real estate firm, tells Forbes. "There was a downturn, and I think his brand had taken a hit as well—he's a very polarizing figure."
And yet it seems Trump made a bundle from losing the contract. Per his disclosures, revenues for the combined entity soared from roughly $3 million in 2015 to $17 million in 2017—the same year that Trump and the hotel split—then went to zero after that.
How did Trump—who has never met an item he did not want to emblazon with his name (he just rolled out two Trump-branded watches in September , one of which retails for $100,000)—make money by taking his name off a building? The most likely conclusion seems to be that some portion of that spike in cash flow was thanks to a breakup fee covering the remaining duration of the contract, which is what owners often have to pay when they switch to other partners or brands.
"Let's say you're terminating your agreement with the brand, such as Trump," explains Mike Powell, principal at a Honolulu-based real estate brokerage (and a former Hilton vice president). "In the branding agreement—and it's probably one inclusive agreement blending management and brand—there's a stipulation that you're going to pay x number of times the last 60 months of revenue, or whatever the case might be, if you want to get out of your agreement." (Neither Trump nor the Dominick commented.)
SoHo wasn't the first building to ditch Trump's name and hotel management company after the billionaire became perhaps the most polarizing and controversial president in recent memory. The slow-moving decline of Trump's hotel brand began just north of the border in Toronto in June 2017—beating SoHo by approximately six months—when investment firm JCF Capital bought out the management contract for the 70-story lakefront hotel, now a Marriott.
A Forbes review of his financial disclosures, along with tax documents and company documents released in his fraud trial, indicates that things went similarly to Manhattan. Management revenues at Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, which also saw protests following the tycoon's election victory, jumped from just over $500,000 in 2015 to more than $2.2 million in 2017, again per his disclosures.
Seven years later and 5,000 miles away, Trump's deal with a beachfront Honolulu hotel faced a similar fate. The Los Angeles-based hotel owners, Irongate Group, announced that the management and licensing contracts had been bought out in November 2023—the property is now a Hilton—and Trump's name came down in February 2024. "You make a change because you're expecting better performance," says Powell. "The Trump brand has a number of disadvantages," he adds, noting both politics and the lack of a "huge loyalty program." In this case, Trump's payment seems to have come before the breakup was announced in 2023. He reported on his disclosures $13 million in licensing fees for the property in 2022—a sudden spike from mere hundreds of thousands in prior years—and then no further licensing income afterwards, a sign of yet another contract buyout.
Not every contract's end appears to have resulted in a payout. Trump's hotel in Panama City dropped his name in 2018, leading to an acrimonious handover that reportedly involved Panamanian police stepping in as peacekeepers between Trump's team and the owners. So far there's no evidence of a breakup fee, at least in the revenue figures.
Ditto for his hotel in Vancouver, which opened in 2017 and closed in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, reopening in 2022 as the Paradox Hotel. Joo Kim Tiah, the CEO of Holborn Group, which owns the Paradox, declined to say whether there was a buyout fee in response to questions from Forbes and also declined to assess the business impact of moving away from the Trump brand. "I can confirm that the hotel is doing extremely well as Paradox Vancouver," he says, adding that "both parties parted on good terms and the current ownership group continues to hold the Trump Organization in high regard."
It's tough to say exactly how much all the breakup fees add up to, but Forbes estimates it was at least $15 million and could have been as high as $25 million all together. That's a sizable share of his struggling management and licensing business 's total profits—roughly $110 million from 2017 to 2023, per Forbes estimates. In other words, Trump could have made almost a quarter of his licensing and management money from hotels taking his name off buildings, not putting it on them.
Following years of his name coming down—Trump also sold his D.C. hotel and a project in Rio de Janeiro never came to fruition—the billionaire's licensing and management business is finding new places to hang its shingle. After friendly diplomacy with wealthy Gulf states while he was president and Saudi investment in Trump's son-in-law's private equity fund, two new Trump hotel locations in Oman and Dubai are now slated to open in the coming years. (Already, those deals brought him millions in 2022 and 2023 ). "The luster of the Trump name seems to have worn off, certainly in this industry," Woods says. "Maybe his brand still has resonance over there."
With additional reporting by Dan Alexander.
