THE NEW Trump Tower in Worli, a buzzing district of Mumbai, looks like any building site but its marketing sells a dream. A golden structure soars to the sky alongside a picture of Donald Trump. He is—potential residents are assured—the gold standard around the globe, a dealmaker without peer who operates across the gateway cities of the world and the man who built the American dream. Until a few days ago the developer, Lodha, carried a message on its website: “Congratulations Mr President-elect”. But now that a storm has blown up over the possible conflicts of interest between the various operations of Mr Trump’s group and his new job, it has been deleted.
The self-embellished legend is of a global tycoon. In a kind of mirror image, outraged suspicion is mounting that the Trump Organisation could morph into a vast global network of cronyism. America has been treated to reports of multi-billion dollar projects across the planet, to photos of Mr Trump glad-handing businessmen and to images of exotic, Trump-branded buildings standing like monuments to the decay of American ethics. Paul Krugman, a left-of-centre economist, has suggested that the Trump family could reap $10bn while its patriarch is in office.
The president-elect’s unconventional methods mean it is too early to say if that will even begin to come to pass. But understanding the threat requires a sober view of his firm. Far from being a global branding goliath, it is a small, middle-aged and largely domestic property business. If Trump family members are to make a second fortune in the next four years, they will have to reinvent a mediocre firm. It could even be the weakness rather than the potential of their company that is most likely to motivate Mr Trump to blur the line between politics and business. 
Information on the Trump Organisation is mainly limited to Mr Trump’s filings with election monitors. The Economist has aggregated the financial data of 170-odd entities, which were filed in 2015. For some assets the filings only provide a range of values and revenues, so we have added our own estimates and those of third parties.
Start with size. Trump Inc is worth perhaps $4bn, with $490m of annual revenue. Were it listed it would be the 833rd-largest firm in America by market value and 1,925th by sales. Other occupiers of, and contenders for, high political office—including Nelson Rockefeller, Ross Perot, Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg—have owned and run more powerful firms.
About four-fifths of that value sits in residential and commercial properties, including golf courses, owned by the Trump Organisation. Half of the group’s entire worth consists of five buildings: Trump Tower and two other Manhattan buildings, and passive stakes in two offices in New York and San Francisco that are controlled by Vornado, a real-estate trust that is entirely separate.
The group’s branding operation is puny, generating only 11-13% of its asset value and sales. Its largest individual source of fees is Panama, where there is a Trump-branded hotel. The Mumbai project has paid annual fees of about $550,000 for the Trump brand. Hotels in Toronto and Manila also paid modest sums. It is also a domestic affair: 66% of the Trump Organisation’s value is in New York and 93% is in America. Mr Trump created its best assets over a decade ago. His directorships inside the group rose from 235 in 2007 to almost 500 last year, as entities such as China Trademark LLC and Trump Marks Egypt LLC were formed. But few of these vehicles generate income; if anything, they are evidence of disorganisation and disappointed ambition.
Second rate on Fifth Avenue
The Trump Organisation could now profit from the presidency in two ways. First, the profits of existing assets could rise. The Economist has obtained data on hotel-room prices from an online travel agent. If the value of the Trump brand had risen during the election campaign you might expect a surge in prices. During 2016 the average room rate per night for a Trump-branded hotel in America fell by 1%, in line with other 4- to 5-star hotels. True, in November there has been a 12% spike in prices compared with a year earlier (see chart). But even if this is maintained it is unlikely to flow directly to the group’s bottom line. Most hotel-franchising fee deals are long term and insensitive to trading conditions. Likewise the tenants of commercial office properties that Mr Trump owns will have long-term leases. So even if the prestige of the brand rises, it may take many years—more than four—for that to translate into higher cashflow.
What has risen fast is the volume of rooms sold in the group’s hotels, which is up by an average of 40% in 2016. That is due mainly to the opening of a hotel in Washington, DC which, unusually, Mr Trump owns. And that in turn illustrates a simple fact: to profit from Mr Trump’s stint in office, the Trump Organisation will have to rely on a second approach, creating new, majority-owned assets and projects.
Negotiating a rash of new hotel, golf course and skyscraper deals would be hard. The commercial real-estate market in New York is soft: having risen by an average of 9% a year in the past half-decade, rents have been flat in 2016. The number of Americans playing golf has dropped by a fifth since 2005. The global hotel industry is saturated after a 20-year building boom. Trump Inc’s record of finishing projects and picking partners is patchy—a big development in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, has stalled, for example.
A new problem may be bank finance. Big banks play a vital role in the industry: Lodha, the Indian developer, says JPMorganChase is an investor in its projects; Mr Trump owed over $120m to Deutsche Bank according to his 2015 filing. If new Trump projects are subject to claims of conflicts and cronyism, global banks that are exposed to litigation and congressional hearings in America may not stump up. Loans from state-owned banks in the emerging world may be prohibited by the constitution’s ban on payments to the president from foreign governments.
Poor performance could prompt Trump Inc to try and diversify into less capital-and-debt intensive products sold directly to consumers. Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, runs a fashion and jewellery brand. If Mr Trump’s children take over management of the firm, as he proposes, they may feel liberated to experiment.
It seems likely that President Trump will inevitably blur the lines between business and politics in potentially disturbing ways—expect grubby deals and murky meetings. But it is less clear that his firm’s value will soar. With old assets in mature industries, a patchy record, disrupted management and controversies over conflicts of interest, Trump Inc’s value could stagnate or fall. And that, rather than the thrill of fresh billions, could be what really distracts America’s new leader.