Shares in publicly traded real estate firms took a beating as the world digested the impact of President Donald Trump’s deluge of new tariffs on foreign countries.
April 3 proved to be a gloomy day on Wall Street, including for REITs.
The Nareit Equity REIT index, which tracks publicly traded real estate owners, was down 2% as of just before noon Thursday, outperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, which were down more than 3% and 4%, respectively.
Hotel and industrial REITs, dependent on the movement of people and goods from overseas, have particularly been bitten by sell-offs. The hotel REIT index was down roughly 8%, while industrial REITs were off their opening price by nearly 7%, according to Nareit’s U.S. Global REIT Index Data tracker.
The largest industrial REIT in the world, Prologis, was down nearly 7% to $104 per share. Hotel giants Hyatt Hotels Corp. and Marriott International were down more than 6%, and hotel REITs RLJ Lodging Trust and Host Hotels & Resorts were both down more than 7% by lunchtime.
Retail owners, stung by the perception that shopping will become more expensive, also watched their stock price fall. Retail REITs were down almost 4% overall, with shopping centers down 4% and regional malls 7%.
Office REITs BXP, Cousins Properties and Highwoods Properties were all down more than 4% as of midday trading. Blackstone, the private equity giant that owns more real estate than anyone, was down 7.5%.
While global REITs were down overall by more than 3%, European REITs were up by 2%. Manufactured housing, infrastructure and healthcare REITs benefited from the news, with their stocks up 2%, 3% and 1%, respectively.
Trump signed orders implementing 10% baseline charges to all foreign goods entering the U.S. which go into effect April 5. Trump also slapped steeper tariffs on certain countries, including a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union, 34% from China, 24% from Japan, and 32% from South Korea.
Trump also ended by executive order on Wednesday the de minimis exception on China and Hong Kong that let goods worth less than $800 enter the U.S. without a tariff, a loophole that helped China-based online retailers like Shein and Temu.
Some experts have raised the specter that the global trade war sparked by Trump’s tariff program could propel the U.S. into a recession.
“This was the first bullet thrown in this trade war and it could get nasty and that is spooking investors,” Brown Brothers Harriman Senior Markets Strategist Elias Haddad told Reuters. “We’re going to continue to trade on a heavy tone because of the heightened risk of either recession or stagflation.”
The fallout from the tariffs — the biggest shift to global trade in 100 years — didn’t just hit REITs. CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm, saw its stock fall more than 5% to $123 per share as of 11:30 a.m. Colliers fell nearly 5%, JLL fell more than 6% and Cushman & Wakefield was down more than 7% during the same period.
