Topix Underground

Hey Tman, you got suckered by your own again!!



"...But as Sarah Rumpf points out in her piece on Mediaite, Stewart's situation is nothing at all like Trump's, and Stewart's real estate valuations and sale were commonplace, nonfraudulent, and perfectly legal.

What's happening here is Pool, Jacob, and other critics attacking Stewart are conflating three different types of real estate values. Whether that's being done through an innocent mistake or a deliberate effort to spread misinformation, we'll leave it to the reader to decide, but they're confusing 1) the actual market value of a property, or what someone would be willing to pay for it, 2) the property's taxable value as assessed by a governmental agency property appraiser, and 3) documentation about a property's value submitted to a lender for the purposes of securing a loan.

Trump got in trouble for committing fraud regarding that third category, the information the Trump Org submitted to lenders to secure loans. Among the misrepresentations, perhaps the most egregious was the "tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse," which Judge Arthur Engoron noted in his scathing ruling was an undeniable and indefensible falsehood.

t's incredibly common for there to be a vast disparity between a property appraiser's assessed value and the actual real world market value for residential real estate across the country — plus multiple limitations under state law on how the government can value your property.

[T]he property appraiser's assessed valuation was both a public record accessible to the buyer and a number over which Stewart had no control.

Stewart's real estate transaction was totally above board, no laws were broken, and no fraud was committed..."