Once, SoHo had no Trump skyscrapers, no hotel condominiums and no luxury spas or private cabanas, and even further back there were no hedge-fund managers with nose jobs or Italian soccer stars.

But things have changed. Trump SoHo, the 46-story glass tower at Spring and Varick streets, has already sold a slight majority of its units—53 percent, sales chief Rodrigo Niño told The Observer this week—even though sales began just in September, and the building isn’t scheduled to open until 2009.

“I have 70 percent foreign and 30 percent from domestic U.S.,” said Mr. Niño, the founder and president of Prodigy International Development Sales. “I would say that out of the 30 percent, one-third is New Yorkers.”

One of the buyers—the first in the building to be named!—is the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimović, the 26-year-old star striker for Inter Milan, one of Europe’s top soccer teams. So far this year, Mr. Ibrahimović, born to Bosnian parents, is averaging one goal per game.

He paid close to $2.5 million for a 781-square-foot one-bedroom hotel-condo unit, which can’t be used for more than 120 days in the year—and not for over 29 days in a row. “I think a clientele that only stays in midtown,” Mr. Niño said, “and has to drive all the way down here for restaurants and places like that, will have a hotel with standards they expect. So it will fill up the old-world SoHo economy.”

Other buyers, he said, come from Spain, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Singapore and Hong Kong. As for Mr. Niño, who speaks in a cinematic Colombian accent, Trump SoHo is only his second New York job. “I became the largest in Miami,” he said of his salesmanship. “I’m the outcome of the international trend!”

But things haven’t been fully smooth at the building. In December, The Times reported that an employee of Trump’s development partner had been accused of money laundering and stock manipulation before changing his name. A month later, after neighborhood activists complained that the speed of construction was a way of silencing community opposition, two workers fell from the 42nd floor during concrete pouring. One worker was caught in netting, but another, Yuriy Vanchytskyy, dropped and died.

That hasn’t necessarily hurt sales, which should be finished by the end of the year. “We’ll be increasing prices shortly,” Mr. Niño said. “Yes, yes, because obviously the building has to appreciate based on the demand that I have at the project.”