Jeffrey DeBoer, founding president & CEO of The Real Estate Roundtable and winner of the Commercial Property Executive 2023 Influence Awards’ inaugural Lifetime Achievement award delivered a keynote address that reflected a 42-year career of advocacy, policy influence and public service on behalf of real estate professionals and the communities that they serve.

Alongside influencing decades of Federal legislation around investment, lending, property taxes, energy, and homeland security, DeBoer and his organization have transformed both the public and Washington’s perception of the industry itself. The trajectory of DeBoer’s career reflects the magnitude of these transformations. From a beginning as a lawyer in the 1980s to overseeing a 150-member leadership organization with portfolios of more than 12 billion square feet of office space and more than $4 trillion worth of industrial properties, The Real Estate Roundtable has become the spearhead of the industry’s interests.

Transforming both policies and perceptions

When DeBoer was starting out as a real estate tax policy lawyer in the 1980s, the industry was a highly “opaque” clique of sector-specific local developers, owners and property managers that were perceived by both the public and Washington as selfish hoarders of land, capital and tax subsidies.

“It was dominated by powerful, local or sometimes regional private developers, owners and managers. It was splintered along geographic lines and along product types,” DeBoer recounted. “Industry sectors did not support each other. Urban owners didn’t work with suburban owners or rural owners. It was a mess, frankly,” he added.

Of course, such a disassociated perception influenced a deleterious policy. One example was the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which had a “very detrimental impact on values and investment returns,” DeBoer reflected. “Many say that the bill caused countless bankruptcies and lender failures,” he lamented.

For there to be any meaningful change, DeBoer knew that the roots would have to be in people valuing public service, advocacy and collaboration over individual growth. “We wanted to flip the Washington perception of real estate from one centered on individual self-interest to one that emphasized the positive connection that real estate has to job growth, local budgets, education and safe communities and better opportunities for everyone,” DeBoer explained. Ultimately, DeBoer’s goal was to influence and create a policy that focused “on growing healthy income producing real estate asset values and their benefit to communities.”

The first step was finding common ground among the diverse field of professionals, regions and asset classes. Here, industry leaders of all types needed to work with both each other and trade associations, in order to “unite into one voice the discrete types and uses of income producing real estate,” DeBoer detailed. Consequently, the industry’s views of its own needs needed to shift from the owners and their bottom lines to their properties’ impacts on their locales. All this reflected a desire to “erode the policy debating differences between asset types and entity classifications,” according to DeBoer.

At the same time, what was equally important to influencing Washington’s perspectives and policies was having members with educated, nuanced takes on policy. “We also wanted to up the quality of our policy positions. In essence, we wanted to be viewed as knowing what we were talking about not just reacting to proposals,” DeBoer said.

Lasting, meaningful impacts

The effects of DeBoer’s approach and its subsequent impact on policy were enormous. In terms of monetary policy, The Real Estate Roundtable worked to cancel debts, sparing industry professionals from passive loss rules. “These saved many struggling owners at the time and helped to propel the industry into the public markets,” DeBoer said.

Not only did the Roundtable’s lobbying enhance the industry’s contributions to its employees and society, it also bolstered its resiliency. In 2002 following the September 11 attacks, the organization successfully developed and saw to enactment the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which provides the industry with guaranteed insurance from losses resulting from acts of terrorism. Six years later, during the Great Financial Crisis, the Roundtable further mitigated the industry’s struggles by influencing extensions for the payment of impaired loans and stalled the maturation of commercial mortgage backed securities.

The strength of the Roundtable’s policy proposals transcended party politics as well. All of the organization’s tax proposals were preserved under the tax bills of both President Biden and Trump, “laws that many of us have worked over the years hard to reflect the economics of real estate ownership and investment, and not be viewed as subsidies,” DeBoer noted.

In addition to proposing new legislation, The Real Estate Roundtable preserved existing laws. One example was the regional center program of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, which the Roundtable cleaned up to expedite the visas of foreign investors and further stimulate the economy. “It’s hard to believe that that an expired, and extremely controversial immigration program was cleaned up and reinstated into law,” DeBoer said.

Just getting started

Equally extensive as DeBoer’s achievements was his humility. “They’re due to a lot of different people working in different teams to analyze issues, develop strategy, create and deliver understandable messages,” DeBoer reflected. “The Roundtable leadership has from day one, provided me with exceedingly supportive guidance,” he added.

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Like the organization he worked to grow, DeBoer’s roots were in his upbringing and unique perspectives. Raised by parents from the Greatest Generation in South Dakota, DeBoer was always taught that “success would come through hard, honest, respectful work.”

Despite accepting an award for a lifetime of contributions to the industry, DeBoer has no intention of stopping anytime soon. As the industry enters “a period of heightened policy risk,” in areas from housing development to interest rates, DeBoer sees advocacy as more important than ever. “It’s very important that everyone recognize that to ignore Washington in the coming years is to increase your business risk,” DeBoer cautioned.” I believe that as citizens, we can all do better individually and collectively, (and) we need to encourage sound, fact-based policy action on big, important national issues,” DeBoer concluded.