Truth Social Is Plummeting. This Trump Property Is Not.

“Turn on your television and watch the great LIV Golf tournament live from Doral, Miami,” Donald Trump posted in all caps on Truth Social, his Twitter knockoff, on April 7, in between bragging about his fundraising numbers and showing off a poll indicating he would beat Michelle Obama in a hypothetical 2024 matchup. Indeed, for the third straight year, LIV Golf—the Saudi investment fund-backed one-time competitor to the PGA Tour—hosted a tournament last weekend at Trump National Doral, Donald Trump’s glitzy golf resort near Miami. The club’s manager, who used to run Trump’s money-losing D.C. hotel, said there was a “record crowd,” tagging his post “#success” and “#neversettle.”

Donald Trump has lost about $2 billion in just over two weeks—in paper wealth, at least. His 79 million shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates Truth Social, have steadily slid since the company went public via a SPAC merger on March 26. That day, the ex-president was worth $6.4 billion at market close, more than double what Forbes had previously estimated his net worth; now, as of Friday, he’s worth about $4.4 billion. That’s an average drop of $118 million every day, not to mention the $540 million in legal liabilities dragging his fortune down further.

But at Doral, Trump can find comfort in his old real estate empire, still worth just under $2 billion. Some of his assets are down over the past year, but some are up, and Doral is doing better than any other piece of property: It shot up by more than $100 million between 2023 and 2024, per Forbes estimates. We now value the roughly 670-acre property at about $273 million—almost as much as Mar-a-Lago at $325 million, before debt—and then subtract out Doral’s $125 million mortgage for a net value of roughly $149 million.

After buying Doral for $150 million in 2012, Trump reportedly poured upwards of $200 million into renovations, including of the golf courses and hotel, only for the property to struggle with decreased revenues during his presidency. So what’s behind its recent surge in value? Simple: revenues and profits have skyrocketed lately. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, Doral brought in less than $10 million in profits on about $77 million in revenues, per Forbes estimates. But now, estimated profits have nearly doubled to $18 million and estimated revenues exceed $100 million, based on an analysis of disclosures Trump files as a candidate for president.

The club is benefitting from multiple booms at the same time, several golf and resort experts tell Forbes. Baird research analyst Michael Bellisario says that there are “long-lasting, secular tailwinds for consumer experiences and travel,” thanks in part to the post-pandemic trend of hybrid work enabling longer weekends. “That’s a winning recipe for resorts’ values and performance,” he adds.

Especially golf resorts. “It’s the best three years in the history of the golf industry,” Peter Nanula, an investor focused on golf clubs, tells Forbes. Post-pandemic, demand has been helped by more flexible work options—“more ability for people to spend time away from the office,” Nanula says—and supply continuing to shrink after a two-decade glut of too many courses. “For a golf course or golf club owner, that’s a good thing,” he adds.

Doral, which boasts four courses, was well-positioned to take advantage of such a boom. Golf represented a quarter of the resort’s revenues in 2022, according to documents released during Trump’s fraud trial, and a similar share for the parts of 2023 for which data is available. (Before 2022, golf wasn’t broken out as its own category on the documents.) The LIV Golf tournaments on the club’s notoriously difficult “Blue Monster” course have helped, too.

Trump’s other clubs have benefitted as well. Forbes estimates that his thirteen Trump National clubs around the U.S. and Europe have increased in value from $310 million in 2023 to $370 million in 2024.

Doral’s South Florida locale may also have something to do with its increase in value. “It’s the old real estate axiom, right? Location, location, location,” says Jeff Woolson, vice chairman of CBRE’s golf and resorts outfit. “There’s probably not a hotter place.”

He’s not referring to the humidity: In the Miami area, both commercial real estate sales and home values remain far above pre-pandemic levels. “They’ve run out of land,” points out Jeff Davis, founder of a golf course brokerage firm. “There’s no more land other than the Everglades, and you can’t build a golf course there—or build homes, and there’s so many people trying to move into Florida.”

Doral’s hotel business is also booming. Revenues from its 643 rooms have climbed steadily year-over-year: $13 million in 2020, $21 million in 2021, almost $30 million in 2022 and nearly $18 million through the first five months of 2023. Food and beverage sales are also climbing, thanks to rich customers opening their wallets. CBRE’s latest hotel market report shows modest month-to-month declines in per-room revenues for all categories—except high-end hotels and resorts. “The wealthy,” Woolson says, “still have money, and they’re spending it on nice places to stay.”

Not that it’s all sunshine. Multiple experts say the cost of insurance in Florida, on the rise alongside global temperatures and sea levels, is already hitting businesses. “Insurance costs are through the roof,” Bellisario says. “That’s impacting transaction activity and valuations. You and I wouldn’t be able to buy a property because we’d get crushed on insurance,” he adds, noting that someone with multiple properties like Trump may be able to pool his risk and get a better deal. Unlike Mar-a-Lago, which sits on the water in Palm Beach, Doral lies inland, mostly outside Miami’s storm surge zones.

More mundane is the possibility of a cooling economy: After years of stimulus and post-pandemic disruption, it’s difficult to say just what a normal leisure market looks like. “There is a question that the golf industry is discussing, and that is, ‘Is this very positive trend being experienced right now going to last? Or are we going to get back to prior levels?’” says Bjorn Hanson, an industry researcher and consultant. “I don’t have an answer for that.”

Trump may have vastly different plans for the land anyway. In 2022, he proposed that Doral replace two hotel buildings with over 2,200 residential units, plus additional amenity and retail space, per documents filed with the city.

Whether hotels or homes, there’s always the issue of the x-factor with the former president. While in office, Trump proposed hosting a G-7 summit at Doral, only to abandon the idea following backlash, which he called “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.” In deep-blue New York City, at least, the Trump name seems to have hurt valuations—apartments in his branded buildings sell for less than comparable apartments without his name on them, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Whether that effect will hold in today’s Florida, a firmly red-trending swing state, remains to be seen. “Is demand better or worse when he’s not the president?” Bellisario muses. “Maybe, in 2025, he will be the president, and there’s a different composition to the demand. Maybe there’s some government-related demand. Maybe there’s less leisure demand.”

An expert who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns over backlash for commenting on Trump suggested that the tycoon’s quieter supporters could help buoy his properties’ values in a second term. “They just want to have an informal, anonymous way of showing support,” he tells Forbes, “and staying at one of his hotels or resorts is a way to do that.”

“It’s almost like a safe space,” he adds. “You won’t be sitting at a table with the people next to you in the dining room ranting about how crazy Donald Trump is, or how could anyone vote for Donald Trump.”

With additional reporting by Dan Alexander.