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As controversy clouds President Trump’s ongoing White House construction projects, a renovation of his first childhood home in Queens, N.Y. ,landed the property’s seller a $1.93 million payday.
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The Jamaica Estates Tudor-style home where Trump spent the first four years of his life was built by his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, in 1940. The future president was born in 1946 and the family sold it in roughly 1950.
The home, which boasts five bedrooms and is about 3,100 square feet, has popped on and off the real estate market over the years — including a 2017 purchase for $2.1 million.
One person even turned it into a Trump-themed Airbnb, the Wall Street Journal noted, complete with “Trump memorabilia” throughout and a plaque in one of the five bedrooms that read “In this bedroom, President Donald J. Trump was likely conceived by his parents.”
After the Airbnb was shut down, however, the house deteriorated, with real estate developer Tommy Lin, who completed the recent reno, recalling that when he bought the house in 2025 for $835,000, that “the roof was leaking, there was no water, no gas, no electricity. It was unlivable.”
So Lin embarked on an eight-month renovation to refurbish and modernize the home — a project that cost him $500,000.
How Trump’s first home went from abandoned wreck to a multimillion-dollar property
In an interview with Mansion Global, Lin noted that “the only reason I took on this project was because it’s Trump’s childhood house.”
In addition to the leaky roof and no water, gas or electricity, the story said that “the entire home had to be gutted to fix damage caused by frequent leaks and add full insulation.”
It added that Lin also replaced the roof and windows and exterior facade, knocked down an interior wall, added herringbone and wide-plank flooring, overhauled the kitchen, added a new HVAC system, re-did all the interiors and put in a fresh garden for $15,000 on its own.
Another report described the residence as “a mold-ridden cat den” that became home to “colony of feral cats.”
The New York Post, meanwhile, wrote that Lin kept an original wood stove but also added modern tech like “smart entry hardware and smart toilets,” while quoting one “peeved neighbor” who said that “A beautiful house was left abandoned and no one took care of it for all this time.”
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According to home improvement site Angi, home reno costs can range, on average, between $15 to $60 per square foot but easily fluctuate based on the age of the home, the square footage, the quality of materials used, the number of new appliances required and if any issues — like dealing with mold — arise.
They also note that different rooms can bring different price ranges, from a high of $28,000 for a bathroom reno to upwards of $40,000 for a kitchen reno — not to mention contractor labor.
Roof replacements, meanwhile, can also run into the $40,000s depending on the scope of the project and material used.
And in an ironic twist, Trump’s own tariffs have bumped up the cost of many U.S. home repair projects — from roofs to windows to HVACs, electrical and cabinetry — due to the extra cost of materials like aluminum, lumber, steel and other materials.
That said, the median sale price in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood is $1,315,000, according to Realtor.com, putting this home above the local average and slightly under Lin’s previous $2.3 million asking price.
The White House didn’t return Moneywise’s request for comment, but Re/Max Edge realtor Joe Zhu, who handled the sale, said that the buyer of the home “appreciated the rare opportunity to own a property connected to the early life of a former U.S. president” — though Trump’s childhood home isn’t the only POTUS-linked property to hit the market recently.
Presidential homes have taken some surprising turns
Thomas Jefferson’s childhood Virginia plantation home — dubbed Historic Tuckahoe — and its 557 acres was listed in July and could be yours for a cool $17 million.
But not all former presidential homes are as well-preserved. The childhood house belonging to the first president, George Washington, no longer exists, but a replica was built at Ferry Farm in Virginia.
The same goes for the homes of 11th president James Polk and 16th president Abraham Lincoln — with one replica of the latter’s log cabin kept in Kentucky.
Of those presidential homes that still stand, 18th president Ulysses S .Grant’s childhood home is unique in that both the residence and his school are both available to visit in Ohio.
The fates of other former presidential homes, however, took different turns. Gray Gables, once the summer home of 22nd and 24th president Grover Cleveland, was eventually sold by the family and turned into a hotel and restaurant before burning down in 1973.
But a home where 27th president William Howard Taft grew up may have one of the strangest legacies of any former POTUS property. It was built in 1840 and renovated in 1851, caught fire in 1877 when Taft was 20 and the family finally sold it in 1899 — a decade before Taft became president.
It went on to serve as an apartment building and was reportedly almost converted into a funeral parlor at one point before the family reacquired it in 1960 and restored it, leading to the property being declared a National Historic Site in 1969.
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Trump’s Queens childhood home sells for $1.93M after developer spent $500K gutting a ‘mold-ridden cat den’
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