Ivanka’s Brand
Ivanka has emerged as not just a key political adviser to her father -- she introduced him at the Republican convention with avowals of his support for gender and racial equality -- but also as the most public face of the family in terms of the future of the Trump brand. Hotels are arguably the one property type where branding matters most, and Ivanka has built a brand of her own, with a lifestyle website and licenses for apparel, jewelry and shoes aimed at consumers seeking to emulate her image as a glamorous working mom.
Sometimes her marketing, which has included posing in magazine spreads touting Trump projects, has backfired. She and her older brother Donald Jr. were criticized for claiming they bought condos in the Trump Ocean Resort Baja in Mexico and exaggerating their family’s involvement in the project. The resort never got built, and most of the buyers, who had lost $32.5 million of deposits, sued. They recovered about $7 million in one settlement and an undisclosed amount in another. Other Trump hotel-condo projects have run into problems. Lender CIM Group seized the Trump SoHo project in 2014 after the condos failed to sell as projected.
Ivanka attended college in Washington, at Georgetown University, before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, her father’s alma mater. She got a bachelor’s degree in June 2004 in economics, with a focus on real estate.
That September, she began an eight-month stint at New York developer Bruce Ratner’s Forest City Ratner Cos. before joining the Trump Organization in 2005. She modeled as a teenager and later appeared in her father’s reality-TV show “The Apprentice.’’ She converted to Judaism before her 2009 marriage to Jared Kushner, also a third-generation scion of a wealthy real estate family.
Food Fight
Ivanka and her brothers formed Trump Hotels, a management company, in 2007. They opened the first Trump International hotel and condo tower in New York and now have at least 15 properties in North America, Scotland, Ireland, Panama and Brazil, some of which they own. Many of the hotels have received industry accolades. The New York one houses a three-Michelin-star restaurant by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. It’s next door to 15 Central Park West, the ultra-luxury condo project whose buyers have included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and singer Sting. Trump Hotels doesn’t disclose financial performance data.
The Washington hotel has had a bumpier time with food offerings. Spanish chef Jose Andres withdrew from a planned restaurant at the property because of Trump’s anti-immigrant comments during the campaign. A day later Geoffrey Zakarian pulled out of a second venue for the same reason. Lawsuits stemming from their departures are pending. Only one restaurant, BLT Prime by David Burke, will be in the hotel when it opens.
Luxury hotels in Washington have performed on a par with similar properties across the country. The average occupancy rate in greater Washington was 76.6 percent year to date through July, according to STR. While that was little changed from a year earlier, average room rates were up 3.2 percent, STR data show. That boosted the revenue per available room, the industry measure of demand, by 2.6 percent.
Rates at Trump’s Washington hotel are well above what other luxury properties in the city charge. A standard room at the Trump hotel goes for $625 a night in mid-February, normally a weaker month for demand, compared with $459 for the Hay-Adams and $342 for the Willard InterContinental.