Ivanka Trump pays $US30m for a Florida hideaway
Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have purchased a waterfront plot in Miami from the singer Julio Iglesias.
After her father lost the presidential election, some fellow New Yorkers questioned whether Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, could ever expect to live peacefully in their old home on Park Avenue, or indeed anywhere.
Now there are signs that they have found a tranquil harbour in Florida, on an island populated by billionaires, just over an hour’s drive from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The couple are said to have purchased an empty 0.8ha plot of land on the waterfront of Indian Creek in Biscayne Bay, Miami, from the singer Julio Iglesias.
The island, frequently referred to as the “billionaire bunker”, has a few dozen waterfront properties along its south and west-facing shores, occupied by a former coach of the Miami Dolphins and various financiers and industrialists. The supermodel Adriana Lima and her husband at the time, a basketball player, were said to have bought a house there in 2009. Jay-Z and Beyonce also owned a property there, which they sold to a Dutch magnate in 2010.
The island’s middle is taken up by the golf course of an expensive country club and the bridge to the island has a checkpoint, guarded by a small police force that patrols the shore.
Iglesias acquired two parcels of land there in 1978, and eventually three more, and built a home on one of them. He listed three of them for sale in 2017, but could not find buyers at the price he wanted.
He listed one of the lots for $US31.8m earlier this year. “This is the one and only spectacular wide-bay lot available on Indian Creek, ideal for building a dream waterfront estate,” the estate agent Jill Eber said at the time.
The land is now being purchased by Mr Kushner and Ms Trump, for at least $US30m, according to the New York Post, which first reported the sale and quoted a source close to the family saying that “the Kushners have been looking to purchase property in Florida for some time, and will maintain their home in New York”.
Mr Trump, who changed his primary residence to Florida last year, is expected to live at Mar-a-Lago. Mr Kushner’s brother Joshua and his wife, the model Karlie Kloss, also have a home in Miami.
Ms Trump and Mr Kushner, who have three children, are also expanding a cottage where the family has spent time on Mr Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster in New Jersey.
In New York City the family have a home on Park Avenue, where liberal denizens of the Upper East Side have suggested they might no longer be welcome. A billboard erected on Times Square by the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project portrayed the couple ignoring the pandemic sufferings of the city. Ms Trump’s detractors there include Samantha Cohen, daughter of the President’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was jailed in 2018 over payments he organised for two women who claimed they had affairs with Mr Trump.
The Times
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