As the nation reacts to President-elect Donald Trump’s win, real estate agents are no doubt wondering what a second Trump term means for housing. Currently, the nation is short of 7 million affordable homes as many hopeful first-time buyers remain priced out of the market.
Trump has offered some hints at how he might address these and other industry challenges.
What Trump has said
Most known details of Trump’s housing platform come from a speech he gave to the Economic Club of New York in early September. That day, Trump suggested using federal land for housing development to help meet demand. “Regulation costs 30% of a new home, and we will open up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction,” he said. “These zones will be ultra-low tax and ultra-low regulations — one of the great small business job creation programs.”
Additionally, Trump expressed desire to lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% for companies that produce in America. “A lower corporate tax rate could stimulate housing activity, boost investment and potentially lead to increased housing market activity,” Mark Hamrick, Washington bureau chief and senior economic analyst for Bankrate, commented after Trump’s remarks. “Among the potential ripple effects could be a rise in construction, more supply and lower home prices.”
Trump also mentioned addressing supply chain problems and curbing regulations on homebuilders although details for those plans were not given.
Mass deportation?
Looking ahead, Trump’s “mass deportation” plan will have a direct effect on housing, should it come to fruition.
In December. Trump promised to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and it became a cornerstone of his campaign. In last month’s vice-presidential debate, his running-mate, now vice president-elect, J.D. Vance alleged undocumented immigrants are responsible for the competition that’s causing housing costs to rise.
There’s conflicting data on how removing undocumented immigrants would affect housing in the long run. Realtor.com cites a study that says higher immigration levels may drive up city rents, overall, but the post-pandemic home-price surge predates the rise in illegal immigration.
According to the National Immigration Forum, there are roughly 1 to 2 million undocumented construction workers nationally, making up between 10% and 19% of the total construction workforce. The large fluctuation is due to misclassification, as undocumented workers are treated as independent contractors with no health insurance, paid leave, or workplace protections. Essentially, that’s cheaper labor for employers.
In full effect, mass deportation could strip about 1.5 million workers from the construction workforce. That includes plasterers, stucco masons, drywall installers, ceiling tilers and roofers, more than one-third of whom were undocumented in 2022, the American Immigration Council reported last month.
Meanwhile, the construction industry requires over a half a million new workers in 2024 alone to meet development goals, according to a September report from the National Immigration Forum.
“In the short run, reducing immigration could severely hurt the labor supply needed for new homebuilding,” Realtor.com senior economist Ralph McLaughlin said, adding that it could have “spill-over effects to the broader economy.”
In the same Realtor.com article, LendingTree senior economist Jacob Channel called the plan’s economic fallout “catastrophic,” vastly outweighing any freed-up housing stock.
Project 2025
Because Trump did not share much about his housing platform throughout the campaign, many eyes are turning to Project 2025: a right-wing policy wish list published by a conservative thinktank, The Heritage Foundation, in 2023. Coming in at over 900 pages, it offers a detailed playbook that Trump could adopt.
The section on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was penned by Ben Carson, Trump’s former HUD secretary. In it, Carson discusses weakening the Fair Housing Act in myriad ways. Among them, repealing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule from President Joe Biden’s administration which was a reversal of Trump’s own reversal of Obama-era policies. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama began emphasizing the AFFH, a provision of the 1968 act, by requiring that all cities receiving federal money for housing or urban development examine and address local barriers to fair housing, including bias against protected classes.
In addition to ending those reforms, Carson calls for ending policies that tackle racial bias in home appraisals and ending the use of “disparate impact,” a tool which refers to unintentional discrimination. Additionally, Project 2025 seeks to abandon the Housing Trust Fund and Housing First programs, which seek to house very low-income and homeless people, respectively.
Hand in hand with those changes, Project 2025 argues that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional. Although the Supreme Court ruled this consumer protection agency was constitutional in May 2024, the HUD chapter outlines ways to undermine it, including overturning a recent rule which seeks to ensure fairness in small-business lending.
Within HUD, Carson advocates turning all leadership positions into political, non-career appointments: an aim of Project 2025, across other departments, too. A 2020 executive order by Trump removed employment protections that prevent career government employees from being replaced for partisan reasons; Biden rescinded this order in 2021.
Interest rates
During his speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump called reducing mortgage rates “a big factor.” He went on, saying, “We’re going to get them back down to, we think, 3%, maybe even lower than that, saving the average homebuyer thousands of dollars per year.”
Of course, the president does not set mortgage rates. They’re affected by the Federal Reserve, which sets the federal funds rate and operates independently. But Trump has expressed distaste with this system. “I feel the president should have at least [a] say in there,” he told reporters in August. “I think that in my case, I made a lot of money, I was very successful, and I think I have a better instinct than in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”
Regardless, mortgage rates have climbed since September, even though the Fed cut its benchmark rate that month.
On Nov. 6, the morning after the election, yields on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.44%, a .14% overnight increase, indicating that mortgage rates will continue trending up, at least in the near future.
Perhaps it’s because investors are taking Trump at his word. “[They] believe if he wins, it will lead to higher tariffs, immigrant deportations and deficit-financed tax cuts in a full employment economy, all of which means higher inflation and more government borrowing,” Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi posted on X last week.
Now, after Nov. 5, Trump’s exact housing priorities are still coming into focus.
“With housing plans remaining brief in the Republican party’s platform, it’s essential that real estate agents should stay close to the news,” Cynthia Seifert, founder of KeyLeads and a former National Association of Home Builders executive, reflected in a statement. “[Agents must] reassure their clients with timely updates on what specific policies could mean for them.”