Donald Trump reentered the White House 100 days ago with a far-reaching agenda that had the potential to reshape vast swaths of the American economy, commercial real estate included.
Many of Trump’s economic policies, from deregulation to tax reform, were expected by many in the business community and commercial real estate to boost growth. But the lightning-fast rate of change coming from the Oval Office has injected new worries into an industry that began the year feeling optimistic after years of gloom.
“Everybody’s frozen,” said Holly MacDonald-Korth, CEO of middle-market lender KDM Financial. “It’s very difficult to make decisions, because you can’t forecast what the future is going to be.”
As rapid-fire changes emerge from the White House, major economic indicators predict lower rates of growth and the specter of a recession once again looms over a CRE industry that thought it was out of danger.
Some of the president’s actions have had major implications for commercial real estate just 100 days into his term, while the ripple effects of other moves haven’t yet materialized and could play out as the year progresses.
Trump’s decisions on tariffs and federal office use have been among his more consequential moves so far, both of which have contributed to uncertainty for CRE and even delayed or killed deals. Meanwhile, issues like infrastructure spending, reshoring, housing reform and changes to popular programs like EB-5 have yet to make a mark.
President Donald Trump has used executive orders to push through policies on everything from remote work to private prisons.
Troublesome Tariffs
On April 2, the day Trump dubbed “Liberation Day,” he announced a crushing new tariff regime that shook a sector already grappling with the president’s early trade proclamations.
Most of the April 2 tariffs were temporarily suspended less than a week later, but a combined 145% levy on Chinese imports remains.
Commercial real estate activity is already being dragged down by the taxes and uncertainty around the cost of everything else. Some of the industry’s biggest names, including Blackstone, Prologis and CBRE, mentioned tariffs in their first-quarter earnings calls as the cause of slower deal activity or simply hesitation around updating guidance.
“Prior to April 2, industrial fundamentals were improving, and had it not been for the recent uncertainty from global tariffs and their downstream impacts, we would have raised our expectations for 2025,” Prologis Chief Financial Officer Tim Arndt said during his company’s Q1 earnings call. “Instead, we’re electing to maintain earnings guidance, as there are no policy conclusions right now to plan differently.”
Prologis also elected to slice its development pipeline for the year by as much as $1B, citing the possibility of a recession or inflation, though the company also acknowledged that a “quick resolution” was possible.
The International Monetary Fund shaved 40 basis points off its 2025 global growth projections, which it now forecasts at 2.8%. The U.S. forecast was cut to 1.8%, down 90 basis points from the January estimate, with nearly half of that contraction directly attributable to tariffs.
“Coming into 2025, President Trump was handed a really solid economy,” said Marisa DiNatale, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics.
The launch of the trade war changed that.
“Our assumption now is that growth is going to be much weaker this year,” she said.
That expectation is already playing out in the marketplace. One out of every five builders has had a project delayed because of tariffs, according to a survey by Associated Builders and Contractors.
And the debt to get projects started hasn’t gotten any cheaper, dashing hopes from earlier in the year. The U.S. Treasury bond yields that drive debt underwriting had begun to move lower after Trump won the White House.
But investors quickly soured after Inauguration Day, as tariff rhetoric turned into policy and Trump looked to make good on pledges Wall Street had taken as bluster.
A recession would inevitably sting the commercial real estate sector, but the wide range of potential outcomes and the inability to predict where the economy is headed has already sucked much of the momentum out of the early innings of the hoped-for market rebound.
“The question now is: How long does this uncertainty last? The longer that it persists, the higher the odds of it actually manifesting itself into a recession,” DiNatale said.
Some do see opportunity in a downturn, including Blackstone, which indicated optimism around its ability to capitalize on a distressed market if a recession materializes.
But for now, business operators aren’t just trying to predict where prices will land, they’re also trying to react in real time as the White House looks to remake the executive branch, the agencies that fall under it and the places where employees at those agencies work.
Emptying Offices
Trump’s effort to reinvent the scope and scale of the federal workforce has been a cornerstone of his term since Inauguration Day, when he signed an executive order banning telework for government employees.
Trump enlisted the help of billionaire Elon Musk to helm the Department of Government Efficiency with a mandate to cut federal spending and waste. Musk and his team of acolytes have torn through government agencies, slashing budgets and firing more than 100,000 of the government’s more than 2 million employees.
At the same time, the government is aggressively pushing to cut its real estate footprint, but the efforts to do so have been mystifying for brokers and landlords.
DOGE has released various lists containing millions of square feet of leases it intends to terminate or properties it wants to sell, only to have those lists removed shortly after posting.
With a portfolio of owned and leased real estate totaling 360M SF, the General Services Administration is the largest office user in the country. A February Barclays report estimated that some $12B in CMBS debt was tied to properties impacted by the cuts.
Billionaire Elon Musk has led Trump’s effort to cut government spending and identify waste.
Turmoil for the country’s largest office user is unwelcome news in an office market that has suffered mightily in the last five years. Office landlords with federal tenant rosters, particularly in Washington, D.C., are grappling with the loss of long-term, high-credit users just as return-to-office numbers began trending favorably.
And the mere existence of DOGE’s lists has upended how investors and debt underwriters look at office buildings with federal government tenants, MacDonald-Korth said. For decades, federal agencies had been seen as top-class office tenants that were unlikely to miss rent payments and had a tendency to renew their leases.
DOGE’s push to walk away from as much leased space as possible has inverted that calculus, she said.
“I have definitely turned down credit files that had government tenants, several of them in the last few months,” she said. “I’m not willing to take the risk.”
Immigration Crackdown
While the glaring impacts on commercial real estate from the moves to remake the federal government are striking, the industry is also grappling with the second-order impacts of a host of other early policy directives from the White House, including moves on immigration.
Trump’s promise to embark on a campaign of mass deportations began with 32,809 arrests in the first 50 days of his administration and has continued with promises to pick up the pace.
Private prison operators expect to benefit from new contracts as the administration ramps up immigration enforcement, but the construction industry expects the crackdown will only exacerbate a worker shortage that has plagued the industry for years.
Roughly 1 in 4 construction workers are foreign-born, and many are in the country legally. But regardless of status, fear runs deep in immigrant communities, with one construction firm owner telling Bisnow in March that employees were afraid to do basic tasks for fear of drawing the attention of immigration officials.
“A lot of these guys are worried to drive and go pick anything up, worried about if they pass a stop sign, are they getting pulled over, are they getting deported if they don’t have the proper documentation?” Huntington Estate Properties founder Ramtin Nosrati said of his workforce in California.
Simultaneously, the administration rolled out plans to replace the EB-5 visa program with what it is calling a Trump gold card. The EB-5 program is a popular route for real estate professionals seeking to enter the country and has facilitated major projects including New York’s Hudson Yards and The Wharf in Washington, D.C. It raised more than $2B each in 2023 and 2024.
The gold card would increase the investment minimum from $1M to $5M, but its timing, legality and availability remain unclear.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was the chairman of Newmark until his appointment to Trump’s Cabinet, has offered multiple timelines that have come and gone. Earlier this month, he said the new program would launch within weeks.
Bill Pulte, left, put himself at the top of the board of directors for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
On The Horizon
Some of Trump’s actions in his first 100 days have resulted in minimal impact so far but set the stage for consequential shifts down the road.
Among these is the administration’s overhaul of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Trump installed Bill Pulte of the family behind homebuilder PulteGroup as director of the FHFA, and Pulte in turn touched off a shake-up at the boards of both Fannie and Freddie. He also dismissed and replaced Freddie’s CEO and fired roughly 100 staff, citing unethical conduct.
At the same time, the administration is weighing a possible end to the yearslong conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie, which underpin the $12T residential mortgage market in the U.S. Removing the agencies from government control would create drastic changes for debt underwriting nationwide.
The administration hasn’t yet committed to ending the conservatorship program. But Pulte has signaled online that more changes are ahead.
While Pulte’s eyes have been firmly focused on the housing market, Trump has spent his first 100 days pushing for more industrial, data center and infrastructure development.
The day after his inauguration, Trump was joined by the heads of OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle at the White House to announce a $500B plan to build Stargate, a sprawling data center campus in Texas.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple have all made similar commitments to spend tens of billions of dollars building out infrastructure and computing power to support what is expected to be the mass integration of artificial intelligence into daily life.
These efforts dovetail with Trump’s tariff ambitions, which he says will bring manufacturing back to the U.S. In this realm, the administration has already notched some early wins, in part because the goal aligns with efforts from Joe Biden’s administration through the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act.
In March, Musk’s Tesla announced plans for a new 1M SF battery factory outside Houston. A day earlier, Honda said it would move electric Civic production to the U.S. to avoid tariffs.
Manufacturing demand accounted for 19% of industrial space requirements in 2024, according to JLL, and the brokerage projected it would reach a quarter of demand by 2028 even before Trump won a second term in office.
The first 100 days of the new Trump administration have been among the most consequential of any modern president. By leveraging dozens of executive orders and aggressively pushing past roadblocks — legal and otherwise — the administration is seeking to reshape global trade and the American economy, taking CRE with it.
In a year that was meant to act as a threshold to a market upturn, many hopes have been dashed for CRE professionals in the face of still-rising costs and a haze of deal-hobbling uncertainty. Still, hope isn’t lost.
“There’s still hope for a soft landing,” Trepp Chief Economist Rachel Szymanski said, referring to the delicate economic balancing act that brings inflation to heel without significantly hurting the job market.
“You’re not really seeing major shifts in inflation and unemployment growth. What you’re seeing is shifts in more than soft data. There’s just a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the actual trade policies.”