Trump should have been granted summary judgment and the case dismissed at the outset. There could not have been fraud as a matter of law, because fraud requires misrepresentations of verifiable facts. .Other than the incorrect size of Trump’s condo, there appear to have been no other verifiable facts in the Trump statements. Real estate values are not proven — and therefore cannot be verifiable facts — until the asset is sold. Several methods are used to guesstimate what any property is worth on any given day, and the valuation process is derived from many subjective judgments, with borrower and lender and buyer and seller typically reaching seriously different conclusions of value. (Bridging the gap between the two parties is the subject of Trump’s bestselling book, The Art of the Deal). Trump’s guesstimated property values at worst can be called puffery, but there can absolutely be no fraud involved without a misrepresentation of verifiable facts of which there was just a single instance. Industry standard operating procedure is “buyer (or lender) beware” and , as in Trump’s case, the lender testified it relied on its own value estimates, not Trump’s.
Trump should have been granted summary judgment and the case dismissed at the outset. There could not have been fraud as a matter of law, because fraud requires misrepresentations of verifiable facts. .Other than the incorrect size of Trump’s condo, there appear to have been no other verifiable facts in the Trump statements. Real estate values are not proven — and therefore cannot be verifiable facts — until the asset is sold. Several methods are used to guesstimate what any property is worth on any given day, and the valuation process is derived from many subjective judgments, with borrower and lender and buyer and seller typically reaching seriously different conclusions of value. (Bridging the gap between the two parties is the subject of Trump’s bestselling book, The Art of the Deal). Trump’s guesstimated property values at worst can be called puffery, but there can absolutely be no fraud involved without a misrepresentation of verifiable facts of which there was just a single instance. Industry standard operating procedure is “buyer (or lender) beware” and , as in Trump’s case, the lender testified it relied on its own value estimates, not Trump’s.
https://www.financialpoise.com/trumps-puffery-legal-defense/
https://fhnylaw.com/puffery-and-the-misstatement-that-wasnt/