Donald Trump will be president once again, having convinced voters he was the man to solve it all: the economy, inflation, housing, and more. But come January, Trump has some promises to keep, promises that may have attracted a certain kind of voter.
“The young voters who, after years living in their parents’ basement, swung right in this election, will expect President Trump to act as America’s real estate developer in chief, and build the housing that they need,” Redfin chief executive Glenn Kelman wrote Wednesday in a note titled: “Way-Too-Early Take: What Trump’s Re-Election Could Mean for Housing.”
In a prior interview, Kelman told me, “Biden’s basic problem with millennials is how optimistic can you be about the economy from your parents’ basement?” That was, of course, before President Joe Biden dropped out of this year’s race, before Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s candidate, and before Trump won it all.
Home prices soared during the pandemic because people could work and live from anywhere, and mortgage rates were lower than they’d ever been. When inflation became a real hot problem, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, indirectly lifting mortgage rates. Americans were left with high home prices and high mortgage rates—and still are, to an extent. Some people can’t buy homes, and others won’t sell them and lose their low mortgage rate: That’s why sales are depressed. Also, after years of underbuilding—and in some cases, decades of policy failure—there aren’t enough homes to go around.
But Trump can maybe fix that, according to Kelman, by “setting aside well-meaning regulations on home-building that limit construction and make housing less affordable,” he said, partly referring to “environmental reviews in already well-settled areas, and limits on apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes.”
It isn’t up to the federal government, though; it’s all up to states and localities, who pretty much control development via land-use regulations, but Trump could create incentives for them to get housing built. “Many of America’s problems are hard to solve, but this one isn’t, especially for a president who loves construction,” Kelman said. Trump was once a real-estate scion, after all.
So far, in the week since the former president has become the president-elect, demand in the housing world has leaped by one measure: Demand from home-buyers requesting service through Redfin’s site was about 25% higher this weekend than the same weekend last year, the largest year-over-year jump since things started to go south two years ago. “Some buyers are undoubtedly enthusiastic about a Trump economy; others may have been waiting to make major decisions until after the election,” Kelman said.
Mortgage rates, which had been falling for a bit on chatter of a Fed cut, rose in anticipation of another Trump presidency. Before the election, two prominent economists told me the “Trump trade” was sending mortgage rates soaring. Kelman echoed that in his note, saying higher tariffs, and therefore higher consumer prices associated with Trump, were being priced in. Mortgage rates higher than what people had become accustomed to pushed the housing market to a standstill, one that saw existing home sales fall to their lowest point in almost three decades last year—and potentially another historical low this year.
On the other hand, it is way too early to tell if demand is better under Trump 2.0 as mortgage rates are still elevated. But the “bizarre pairing could set up a major challenge for a president elected to beat inflation,” he said. It seems home prices would only continue to rise, as they have done, even if it’s at a slower pace. Fed chair Jerome Powell has already admitted that housing is not something the central bank can fix.
Home prices almost never fall. You can only pinpoint two eras in our recent history when home prices declined: a short-lived recession in the early 90s, and the Great Financial Crisis of the early 2000s, as I previously wrote. This time around, we’re missing millions of homes, and that’s keeping prices from dropping—not to mention, our 30-year fixed mortgage keeps everyone with a low interest rate locked-in, exacerbating our very prevalent supply problem and, again, keeping prices high.
We’ll see what another Trump presidency means for the housing world soon. In the meantime, we know his housing policy revolves around mass deportation of illegal immigrants and either deregulation or more regulation (he has hinted at both on different occasions).
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