Inside Trump’s Deep Base Of Support Among Real Estate Executives
With the presidential election now less than three months away, many commercial real estate executives are rallying around one of their own.
Former President Donald Trump, who still owns a large property portfolio through The Trump Organization, is seen by many in the industry as the best option to help supercharge the economy and lift the commercial real estate market out of its recent doldrums.
Trump has raised far more money from the real estate industry at this point of the election cycle than his opponents have, according to campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets. Real estate donors had given $5.3M to Trump's campaign as of the end of June, compared to $3.8M to President Joe Biden.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has now taken over Biden’s war chest, but the data doesn’t yet show how much it has raised from real estate donors since the president stepped down. Harris’ campaign boasted of raising over $200M in the week after Biden stepped down, and another $36M in the 24 hours after naming Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
Commercial real estate executives who had given tens of thousands of dollars to Biden told Bisnow last month they are now throwing their support behind Harris.
This month, Bisnow spoke to several Trump-supporting real estate executives who said the change atop the Democratic ticket doesn’t alter their view that the Republican nominee would be better for the trajectory of the country, the economy and ultimately, the commercial real estate market.
Many Trump backers also declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment. And those who did comment said they worry that Trump’s support from the industry has been overlooked — in part because his backers often stay silent due to the social stigma around supporting the divisive former president.
“We feel ostracized. We have to be quiet,” said Todd Malamut, a principal at Bethesda, Maryland-based retail brokerage NREB who said he is supporting Trump.
“The other side can be as loud as they want, but we have to be quiet. But I would suspect that most business people know better, and the ones that can put the emotion aside and their like or dislike for Trump’s personality aside, they know that he is much better for the economy.”
Trump has received new endorsements in recent months from some of the biggest names in the business world. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said in May he will back Trump, saying the Biden administration’s economic, immigration and foreign policies are going in the wrong direction. Last month, Trump received endorsements from world’s-richest-man Elon Musk, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
He has consistently maintained support from his old competitors and colleagues in New York City real estate, such as Vornado CEO Steven Roth and LeFrak principal Harrison LeFrak, who attended a fundraiser for Trump this month, according to The New York Times.
John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire who owns a real estate portfolio, a grocery store chain and an oil refinery and hosts a radio show, has been a vocal supporter of Trump. He contributed $450K in the first half of this year to the Trump 47 Committee, a joint fundraising committee backing the former president, and has given over $700K more to other Republican groups, according to Bisnow’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
He told Bisnow he had dinner with Trump last weekend in Bridgehampton, New York.
“He’s not a bad guy,” he said. “Is he perfect? No, he’s not perfect. But he is tough. He grew up in the construction industry.”
Catsimatidis said he thinks the Biden-Harris administration has hurt the real estate industry by causing inflation and higher interest rates.
“The only weapon the Fed had was to raise interest rates tremendously,” Catsimatidis said. “The real estate industry is in deep shit; the office market’s in deep shit because [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell] raised them and hasn’t lowered them yet, which is stupid.”
The Fed's 12-member Federal Open Market Committee sets benchmark interest rates.
Neil Bortz, chairman of Cincinnati-based apartment developer Towne Properties, last quarter contributed $50K to the Trump 47 Committee and $38K to the Republican National Committee, FEC filings show. He contributes based on what he thinks is best for the country, not his business, he said in an interview.
But he added that a Trump presidency would lift the overall economy in a way that would benefit real estate.
“I think Trump is clearly better for business based on his record,” Bortz said.
“Trump is unfortunately not as eloquent and becomes fairly sophomoric at times, but I do think he is well-intentioned,” he added.
Lisa Jones, who spent 22 years leading Charlottesville, Virginia-based development firm Pavilion Properties before selling its portfolio in 2019, contributed $100K to Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC backing Trump.
“Spending, the border and inflation are going to destroy us,” Jones wrote in a statement to Bisnow. “Trump policies of energy independence, building a wall and lowering spending and regulations are our only hope.”
Some Trump-leaning commercial real estate executives who haven’t contributed financially have instead shown their support for him on social media platforms like LinkedIn.
That includes Gregory Laskody, principal of Boca Raton, Florida-based capital markets brokerage firm Haute CRE. He told Bisnow he supports Trump in part because of his real estate background.
“I feel he was a remarkably successful businessman, and he operated successful businesses in multiple industries, the most obvious one being commercial real estate, but he did all that far before he became a politician,” Laskody said.
“To me, most politicians really don’t know much about starting or running a business and it’s evident in a lot of the legislation they pass. Because of that, I think he’d be very friendly to the commercial real estate industry, as he was in his first term.”
Christopher Okada, CEO of New York-based brokerage firm Okada & Co., said his family business has worked with the Trump family in Manhattan since the late 1980s. He said he plans to vote for Trump because of financial policies, not social issues.
“He’s an office landlord in New York City running for president, and he understands the macro and microeconomic trends of everything going on in commercial real estate,” Okada said.
Haley Hasho, co-founder of New York City investment sales brokerage Exodus Capital, said she is supporting Trump because the economy and the real estate industry performed much better during the four years he was president than it has over the last three and a half.
“If we remove the Trump bias and just reflect on his administration and his policies, our economy was at an all-time high, we had mass job creation, we had low unemployment,” she said.
Looking back at the Trump presidency, several CRE execs pointed to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and created the opportunity zone program, as a key accomplishment that benefited all sectors of real estate.
The opportunity zone program took a while to gain momentum after being signed into law in late 2017 because the regulations weren’t finalized until December 2019, and then the pandemic disrupted the industry, Laskody said, but he now sees more investors gravitating toward opportunity zones. Hasho said she has seen a surge of investor interest, too, including some clients who will only buy assets in opportunity zones because of the program’s tax benefits.
Opportunity zone funds raised $3.5B last year, 10% above 2022 and bringing the total since the program was created to $37.6B, according to Novogradac. The firm found these funds have financed hundreds of projects around the country, including 181 in Columbus, Ohio, 104 in Cleveland, 65 in Cincinnati, 50 in Los Angeles and 33 in Washington, D.C.
Laskody said the program has encouraged development in distressed areas of the country, and he expects Trump would extend the opportunity zone investment timelines and expand its benefits if elected again.
Real estate executives pointed to Trump’s push to roll back regulations on the banking and energy sectors as something that could benefit the economy and commercial real estate. They also praised his proposals to cut government spending and reduce the federal workforce.
“That’s what attracts me to Trump is that I think he’s going to take a top-down look as an executive, a businessman, about what’s going on with all this spending and does it make sense,” NREB’s Malamut said.
Bortz also said he thinks many government agencies have become “bloated.”
“It’s the healthiest thing for the economy if we can cut overhead, get back to a manageable deficit or hopefully even a surplus,” Bortz said.
Spending was also the top critique that several Trump-supporting CRE execs had of the Biden administration’s policies.
They pointed to the major spending bills Biden signed in the first two years of his presidency — the $1.9T American Rescue Plan Act, the $550B Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the $280B Chips and Science Act and the $2T Inflation Reduction Act — as exacerbating inflation and leading the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to their highest level in two decades.
Those interest rate hikes have caused severe pain for the commercial real estate industry. More than $85B in commercial real estate properties were in distress at the end of 2023, meaning they were handed back to lenders or deemed financially troubled, according to MSCI. That represents the highest level in over a decade and was up from $56.9B at the end of 2022.
“I expect Harris to do the same thing,” Laskody said of the spending. “Probably the most damaging thing that happened to our economy as a result of this administration is the massive interest rates and capital costs that were necessary due to this administration’s abhorrent government spending.”
Bortz, whose firm owns and manages over 15,000 apartments across the Midwest, said he is strongly against Biden’s proposal last month to institute a nationwide 5% rent cap.
“Look at the history: It’s stupid,” he said. “Without question, you put rent control in and you reduce the availability of housing.”
But he also opposes some housing policies that have come from the right.
Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for maintaining single-family zoning in municipalities across the country.
“I would be opposed to that,” Bortz said. “I wouldn’t necessarily be out there trying to protect single-family neighborhoods. I’d let the economic currents take it wherever it’s going to go.”
Trump has become an even more divisive political figure since leaving office.
He has faced four criminal cases, including a conviction in May on 34 felony counts related to the payment of hush money to an adult film actress during the 2016 election. He has also faced a special counsel prosecution for seeking to subvert the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021. And in February, a New York judge ordered Trump to pay $355M — more than $450M when including interest — after ruling he and his real estate business had committed “persistent and repeated” fraud.
These cases, which Trump has decried as politically motivated, have led some commercial real estate executives to oppose Trump on the basis that he threatens the functioning of a free democracy, even if they acknowledge his policies may be better for their business.
“I don’t think there’s any question that, if I were to vote my pocketbook, that I would probably vote Republican and Donald Trump,” Miami-based retail developer Jeff Berkowitz, who has contributed more than $100K to Democratic candidates, told Bisnow last month, adding that Trump lacks integrity and he would fear for his children and grandchildren if he becomes president again.
Trump’s CRE backers say these kinds of fears are overblown.
When asked about the legal cases, some executives dismissed them as inflated or fabricated by Democrats and the media to try to take down Trump. And while they acknowledge his personality can turn people off, they say the opposition to Trump has gone too far.
“There’s a lack of understanding on the left,” Malamut said. “It’s gone beyond just the preferred candidate. There’s a hatred of him, which is silly because if you look at his policies, he’s been very consistent. The rhetoric is not, but a lot of it does make sense if you can take the emotion out of it.”
