Seeing Opportunity In Trump, Apartment Lobbyists Welcome 'The Moment We've All Been Waiting For'

With the opportunity to find regulatory relief with a sympathetic administration and a consequential tax bill in play, lobbyists for the nation’s apartment industry are seizing the moment. 

Regulatory rollback, tax reform and even support for artificial intelligence in the housing industry have all seen a significant push under a famously anti-regulation president.

“Literally the day after President [Donald] Trump won reelection, we were talking about, ‘This is going to be an opportunity for us to do a lot of things on the regulatory side,’” said David Gasson, co-founder and lobbyist for MG Housing Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm focused on affordable housing issues. 

In early March, a letter co-signed by the National Multifamily Housing Council and National Apartment Association offered a laundry list of industry priorities, including the rollback of regulations that “stifled innovation and hampered housing production when our nation faces a critical housing supply shortage.” 

“I've been doing this work for 30-something years, and I have to tell you, this is the moment we've all been waiting for,” NMHC President Sharon Wilson Géno said. “Where lawmakers understand the challenges that we're facing, and we have an acute housing shortage in this country.”

She pointed to a Jan. 22 memo from the president that listed priorities for the administration, including increasing the housing supply. She believes the administration is looking at regulatory issues through that lens. 

Regulations, and pushing a case for rolling them back, have been a focus of apartment industry groups over the last few months. 

So far, a number of regulatory changes have been made through policy shifts and executive orders. These include postponing energy efficiency standards on appliances, rescinding a directive imposing tenant protections on covered multifamily housing financed through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and terminating the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule.

“NAA appreciates the Trump administration’s attention to these federal regulations that often times are duplicative or conflict with existing state and local compliance responsibilities, ultimately increasing costs and exacerbating housing affordability challenges,” Nicole Upano, NAA’s Associate Vice President of Housing Policy and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in an email to Bisnow.

To Gasson, these were merely 25-yard field goals — regulatory rollbacks that might create more efficiencies or get rid of reporting and regulatory requirements but won’t necessarily lead to building more units. 

The real key goals of the industry will “move the ball down the field” in Gasson’s parlance. Those priorities include tax policy changes, locking in a more muscular Low Income Housing Tax Credit subsidy and repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, a 1931 law requiring prevailing wages for federal construction work. 

The law is applied to any housing that receives federal funding, including affordable projects, and the NMHC and others argue it leads to higher costs and lower housing production. 

Wilson Géno calls the tax bill negotiations “the Super Bowl of tax” due to the number of potential changes being considered. 

A joint letter about Davis-Bacon is expected to be released “imminently” by a coalition of groups, including MG Strategies, the NAA and NMHC, Gasson said. 

Changes to the National Environmental Policy Act and exemptions to the Joe Biden-era Build America, Buy America provision may be on the table, Gasson said of recent discussions with the administration. 

The current LIHTC proposal passed in the House Ways and Means Committee on May 14. As written, it would restore a more generous housing credit allocation that expired in 2021, lower the bond financing threshold to 25% from 50%, and add additional funding boosts for rural and Native communities. Since being enacted in 1996, the LIHTC has financed the development of more than 3.7 million affordable rental homes.

The NMHC spent $9M last year and in the first quarter of 2025 spent $1.8M, which Wilson Géno partially attributed to educating roughly 80 new members of Congress. During Q1 2021, when Biden entered office, the NMHC spent just over $1M. The NAA followed suit, spending $2M last year and $610K during the first three months of 2025.

Another key issue for the apartment industry is the use of AI, especially for rental pricing and tenant screening applications. Wilson Géno said that the housing market needs AI because it offers real-time data and capabilities that, among other things, give investors more confidence. 

Disallowing apartment owners from using tenant screening services means investors can’t use the best data to make decisions, which could push them to other industries, she said. 

The NMHC has supported AI firms in the housing industry, including RealPage, which has been the subject of a Department of Justice antitrust suit filed last August during the Biden administration and municipal bans due to allegations its price-setting algorithm amounts to price fixing. The NMHC recently supported provisions in the budget reconciliation negotiations that would ban localities from regulating AI for a decade. 

Wilson Géno noted that the NMHC supports the tech and RealPage, which is a member of the group. RealPage has donated $220K to the NMHC’s political action committee.

“What algorithms and pricing software do is, they are mirrors,” she explained. “They're not the thing itself. You look in the mirror and you don't like your face. It's not the mirror’s fault, it's your face, right?”

The Trump administration’s stance on RealPage and AI in housing, combined with its housing policy shifts, may have larger implications for the use of AI by apartment owners. 

The White House has rescinded the disparate impact rule, which places the burden of proving discrimination on renters instead of asking landlords to prove they did not violate fair housing rules. 

This change, along with a lighter regulatory touch on tenant screening apps, would allow landlords to use the technology without fear of fair housing challenges, according to Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project. 

Advocates have long claimed that tenant screening apps, which typically charge applicants a fee for every screening and application, can lead to discrimination based on income streams or faulty data. 

Porter said that without disparate impact, “The owner or the management company simply says, ‘Not us, them,’” in reference to the tech company. And in turn, the tech firm says, “Not us, algorithm.”

But the industry hasn’t taken to all Trump administration policy proposals. Lobbyists and housing industry leaders have concerns about the significant cuts that the Trump administration has planned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its programs, including slashing Section 8 Housing vouchers.

Gasson called the White House’s proposals “untenable and unworkable,” but he said many in the industry aren’t afraid of such drastic cuts and argues that congressional leaders on housing, such as Rep. Tom Cole and Senator Susan Collins, will likely push back. NAA’s Brown said the organization is “concerned with the scale” of the proposed cuts to HUD programs in the skinny budget.

“Do I expect to see that kind of catastrophic proposal implemented by Congress?” said Wilson Géno. “No, I don't think that's true, and when we talk to the administration, we're very clear that Section 8 is a critical resource.”