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Former President Donald J. Trump testified on Monday that he had lowered the value of one of his properties — the sprawling Seven Springs estate in New York City’s northern suburbs — because he “thought it was too high.”
He and his company have placed widely different values on the property over the years.
Mr. Trump purchased the 212-acre estate in Westchester County, NY, in the mid-1990s with the hope of developing a golf course or luxury homes. He valued the estate at $291 million on his 2012 balance sheet and in financial records presented to Deutsche Bank, when he was seeking to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
But locals blocked his development plans, and Mr. Trump eventually claimed a $21 million tax break after agreeing to conserve much of the land. In a 2018 federal ethics filing, he said it was worth no more than $50 million.
Seven Springs is a throwback to another era. The main house, built in 1919 by Eugene I. Meyer Jr., the one-time head of the Federal Reserve who bought The Washington Post in 1933, sits on more than 200 acres of lush, almost untouched land just an hour’s drive north of New York City.
The Trump Organization website described the mansion as being 50,000 square feet, with “three pools, carriage houses, and is surrounded by nature preserves.”
In 2014, Eric Trump told Forbes that the estate “is really our compound.” Growing up, he and his brother Donald Jr. spent many summers there, riding all-terrain vehicles and fishing on a nearby lake. At one point, the brothers took up residence in a carriage house on the property.
“It was home base for us for a long, long time,” Eric Trump told Forbes.
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