Bessent, originally from South Carolina, attended Yale University and worked for George Soros early in his career.
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, appears to have lost six figures in a quick-turnaround real estate transaction earlier this year. After buying a new home in Charleston, South Carolina in January for $4.85 million, real estate records suggest he then sold it for $4.75 million in February. Everything was done through shell companies, so the details are a bit difficult to parse, but here’s what Forbes found in digging into the documents, which do not appear to have been previously reported.
On January 13, an entity called “Palmetto 2020 Trust LLC,” which Bessent discloses as his own on his financial disclosure, purchased a waterfront home in Charleston’s glitzy Crescent neighborhood. The 7,100-square-foot mansion sports a pool and bathhouse. and a Zillow listing emphasizes its “fusion of English Gothic and Italian Gothic influences” as well as its privacy. The price tag: $4.85 million.
But then, on February 25, Palmetto 2020 Trust LLC sold the home to another anonymously named LLC, which Forbes is not identifying here because its name contains the address of the home. Bessent’s husband, John Freeman, is listed as the agent for Palmetto 2020 Trust LLC in the sale. Whoever owns that second LLC evidently got a bargain, purchasing the home for $4.75 million, $100,000 less than Palmetto 2020 Trust bought it for in January. The purchasing LLC’s registered agent, a Charleston-area real estate lawyer, did not return requests for comment. Neither did the Treasury Department.
There are two possible explanations. The first is that these companies are both owned by Bessent and Freeman, and this was a transfer with little actual consequence. The couple lives in both Charleston and D.C., per Bessent’s Treasury Department biography, and they sold their previous Charleston home, a 9,000 square foot estate first built in the 1800s, in February for over $18 million. Perhaps they were looking to downsize, given that they also reportedly purchased a $12.5 million home in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood in January. But why the prices differed between the two sales is unclear, then.
The second possibility is that, for whatever reason, Bessent and Freeman got cold feet after purchasing the home and quickly flipped it to another wealthy, and privacy-conscious, buyer, taking a loss in the process. One-hundred thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at for most Americans—the median American’s net worth is about $193,000, according to a 2022 survey from the Federal Reserve. For Bessent, it’s pocket change. A former hedge fund manager, he declared hundreds of millions of dollars of assets on his financial disclosure, including homes in the Bahamas and North Carolina, a commercial building in Charleston and farmland in North Dakota.
The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Bessent had sold at least $127 million in U.S. real estate since the 1990s. He has taken losses before—in 2021, he sold a Upper West Side Manhattan condo for $15 million, over $4 million less than he bought it for in 2017.
