Jason Noble

jnoble2@dmreg.com

Editor's note: In the wake of Thursday's Donald Trump-Mitt Romney scrum, we thought we'd bring back this story from June 2015:

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Real estate developer, reality TV star and potential presidential contender Donald Trump boasted to The Des Moines Register on Monday that 45,000 square feet of commercial real estate he owns in Midtown Manhattan is worth more than Mitt Romney.

It's an inelegant comparison to be sure, but — unlike many of the things Trump says — it's one that can be tested against reality. So we checked it out.

Turns out that several experts on New York real estate back up Trump's off-the-cuff claim, as do several recent sale prices on comparable properties. The retail space in question is definitely worth more than $300 million and could go for over $1 billion.

While there are several variables and uncertainties in play, Trump's claim is almost assuredly true.

In a wide-ranging interview on Monday, Trump spiced up an insult aimed at Romney by bragging that the value of the Gucci luxury goods store at his Trump Tower skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in New York City exceeds the 2012 Republican presidential nominee's net worth.

Here's the full exchange between Trump and Register reporter Josh Hafner:

Trump: I'm the most successful person ever to run for president. I mean, off the record, Ross Perot isn't successful like me. Romney was — I have a Gucci store that's worth more money than Romney.

Hafner: You gotta give me that quote on the record. That's amazing.

Trump: I'll give it to you on the record. You know my store on Fifth Avenue and 57th. It's called Gucci, right?

Hafner: Yeah, I know Gucci.

Trump: You know Gucci. Gucci store is worth more money than Romney. Romney disappointed us. He ran a horrible campaign. We can't let that happen again. [Aside to press secretary Hope Hicks, who was also on the call] I knew he'd like that quote. I was afraid, Hope, that he'd like that quote.

MORE: Read Josh Hafner's full interview with Donald Trump

To get at the truth of the statement, there are two facts in need of checking:Romney's net worth and the value of the Gucci store at 725 Fifth Avenue.

First, how muchis Romney worth?

Romney today is a private citizen under no obligation to release the details of his financial circumstances. A request for comment from an aide to the Romney family was not immediately returned.

Much was written about Romney's wealth during the 2012 presidential race, however. The public financial disclosure report he filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in 2012 placed his net worth between $84 million and $256 million, and a 2012 Forbes examination of various disclosures sharpened that estimate to $230 million.

Now, much of Romney's wealth has resided in the financial markets, which have generally been way up in recent years. Since Jan. 1, 2012, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 48 percent; the S&P 500 is up 68 percent. But in the absence of better data, that $230 million figure will have to be our baseline, with the substantial caveat that the true number is likely north of that by perhaps tens of millions of dollars.

Before we get into the calculations, let's lay out a bit of background on that particular Gucci store. The four-story, 45,000-square-foot space at Trump Tower on the corner of 5th Avenue and 56th Street in Midtown Manhattan is the Italian fashion house's flagship location. In 2010, Bloomberg quoted its annual rent at $16.5 million, a figure that aides to Trump interviewed this week did not dispute but which potentially has increased in the years since.

Although the value of real estate is never certain and always comes down to the price a buyer is willing to pay for it, those two key pieces of information — the store's square footage and annual rent — allow us at least to estimate a value.

Retail condos — retail spaces sold separately from other commercial and residential units within the same building — have become increasingly popular in New York in recent years, and have generated incredible valuations for storefronts in some of the city's marquee shopping districts.

Next, how much is Gucci store worth?

One way to estimate the value of the Gucci store at Trump Tower is to compare it to similar properties that have recently sold as retail condos.

In 2014, 24,700 square feet of retail space in the St. Regis Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street — a block from Trump Tower — sold for $700 million. If the Gucci space sold at the same price per square foot, the price would be $1.3 billion — far higher than Romney's estimated net worth.

In 2011, when the market was much cooler for such real estate, a 32,000-square-foot space sold a few blocks down Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street for $324 million. The same price-per-square-foot would value the Gucci site at Trump Tower at $456 million.

Retail spaces are going for prices rivaling Romney's net worth even in a shopping district far away from Fifth Avenue. In January, a three-level, 47,000-square-foot retail condo in the SoHo neighborhood downtown sold for $280 million.

New York real estate experts reached by the Register also offered back-of-the-envelope valuations for the Trump Tower space based on its size, Gucci's reported rent and a figure known as the capitalization rate, which measures the ratio between the income a property generates and its market value.

Peter Hausperg, chairman and CEO of Eastern Consolidated Real Estate Investment Services in New York, ran the numbers this way: He subtracted 15 percent from Gucci's reported $16.5 million annual rent to account for taxes, insurance and other expenses and then assigned a capitalization rate of 2 percent — which he called generous but reasonable given the state of the market and the store's prime location.

Using those numbers, Hausperg pegged the value of the Gucci store at about $701 million.

"So there's three times Mitt's net worth," Hausperg said with a laugh.

At a more conservative capitalization rate of 3 percent, the value drops to $468 million.

Stephen Shapiro, a senior vice president at the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle in New York, offered even more careful estimates, with capitalization rates of 3.5 percent and 4 percent — and still came up with numbers that likely exceed Romney's net worth.

"It's comfortably worth $300 million or more ..." Shapiro said. "And if you want to be more aggressive and sell to the kind of a buyer that tends to be buying these things, it could be worth far in excess of $400 million. It's crazy what's happened on that one stretch of Fifth Avenue."