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A Phil Hall Op-Ed: As 2024 slowly rolls itself into the history books, let’s take one last look back at the year in real estate and housing policy to cheer those who accomplished something remarkable and acknowledge others who fell far short of what they were capable of doing.

The Winners of 2024

Donald Trump. The real estate mogul-turned-political leader began the year buried under a mountain of lawsuits while being constantly assaulted by the left-wing legacy media and facing challenges from multiple would-be Republican presidential nominees. But not only did Trump triumph over his political foes, his family-run business, the Trump Organization, thrived and continues to prosper with new deals across the US and overseas. To borrow a line from Frank Sinatra: The best revenge is massive success.

Bob Broeksmit. In May, Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) President and CEO Bob Broeksmit called out the Biden administration for working against the best interests of housing market professionals, observing that “it sometimes feels like it is attacking you directly and injuring the Americans you serve.” During a speech before the MBA’s 2024 Secondary and Capital Markets Conference and Expo, Broeksmit pointed out how the Biden administration created a series of “regulatory knots” that “betrays a lack of knowledge about a critical part of our economy.” At a time when industry trade group leaders did not dare to criticize Biden (who was still running for re-election), Broeksmit courageously called out the administration’s failures, noting, “We need commonsense rules of the road. We don’t need regulators to build the car as they drive it at a hundred miles an hour.”

RealPage Inc. In August, the US Department of Justice accused the property management software company RealPage Inc. of masterminding an “unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments.” Oh? The company pushed back at this bizarre accusation, and earlier this month the company announced the DOJ dropped its criminal investigation into the company. “We have remained steadfast in our belief that RealPage never violated the antitrust laws,” said the company in the statement. RealPage announced the DOJ’s dropping of the investigation – the department stubbornly remained silent in the face of its failure.

The Chicago City Council. Earlier this month, the Democrat-controlled municipal body successfully pushed back at Mayor Brandon Johnson’s demands to jack up property taxes as a means of closing the city’s $1 billion budget deficit. Clearly, the council’s members were listening to their constituents who rejected Johnson’s attempt to enact a so-called mansion tax earlier in March. Perhaps these developments will mark the beginning of the end of tax-and-spend obsessions in Democrat-controlled cities?

The Real Estate Philanthropists. Among the year’s heroes are prominent real estate executives and organizations who paid forward their career success with philanthropic gifts to educate the next wave of real estate professionals. Among the generous philanthropic endeavors: CBRE Vice Chairman Alex Hayden for his $5 million gift to Orange, California-based Chapman University to establish the Alexander E. Hayden School of Real Estate within the George L. Argyros College of Business and Economics; The W. P. Carey Foundation committing $25 million to expand the depth and scope of the real estate program at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business; Charlotte-based real estate developer Peter Pappas giving $10 million to NC State University, his alma mater, for the creation of a real estate development program; and former Goldman Sachs Managing Director Mark Buono for his $2 million gift to South Carolina’s College of Charleston has received a $2 million gift to create the Buono Endowed Professorship in Commercial Real Estate in the college’s School of Business. Special mention also goes to Equiton, a Burlington, Ontario-based private real estate firm, for its new partnership with the John Molson School of Business at Montreal’s Concordia University to support research into Canada’s real estate investment landscape.

The Losers of 2024

The National Association of Realtors (NAR). I cannot recall another trade organization that produced such a great quantity of self-inflicted injuries while antagonizing its membership, whose patience heavily frayed with each new scandal and misstep. NAR’s answer to its problems is to hire an advertising agency to spin it out of its mess. Let’s see how well that works out in 2025.

The American Real Estate Association (AREA). There was great interest when high-profile real estate professionals Jason Haber and Mauricio Umansky brashly launched AREA in January as an alternative to NAR. As Haber explained, “NAR was too big to fail, until it failed. People want something different. We’re setting ourselves up for failure if we try to replicate the NAR model.” Well, here we are at the end of December and where is AREA? We haven’t heard a peep out of them in months, and one has to wonder why Haber and Umansky are no longer talking up AREA.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The folks running HUD often seemed to think they were running the Department of Energy, which may explain why too much of HUD’s attention and funds allocation has focused on climate change and energy efficiency instead of its core mission of housing and urban development. Things got so out of hand that National Association of Home Builders Chairman Carl Harris complained about HUD’s decision that it will insure mortgages for new homes only if they are built to the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), declaring, “Studies have shown that building to the 2021 IECC can add up to $31,000 to the price of a new home and take up to 90 years for a home buyer to realize a payback on the added cost of the home.”

Justin Trudeau. On Dec. 16, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau saw his Housing Minister Sean Fraser and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly quit his government. This capped off a year where Trudeau’s disastrous social and economic policies resulted in a distressed country that accepted too many immigrants without having proper housing available for them – not to mention having adequate housing for Canadian citizens. And adding insult to injury, Trudeau had the audacity to comment on the US presidential election by berating Americans for refusing to elect a woman as president! Trudeau is up for re-election next October – whether he’ll step down before the election or if he’ll go down to a certain defeat remains to be seen. But either way, his days of leadership are numbered.

The Tactless Millionaires. A big shame-on-you goes to the owners of the Chicago Bears and the Cleveland Browns for trying to shake down taxpayers in their respective cities to finance the construction of new stadiums, and two thumbs down go to Rocket Companies founder Dan Gilbert and General Motors for trying to get taxpayer money to demolish part of Detroit’s Renaissance Center for the creation of a waterside park. All these efforts have received angry pushback from both the residents of those cities and their elected officials. This is another trend that should take root in 2025: saying no to millionaires trying to finance for their personal pet projects with taxpayer money.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Photo: Getty Images