Borrower Terms Improving But U.S. Policies Cloud Optimism for 2025: MIPIM Panelists

The capital markets have opened up, banks have more liquidity, and there’s plenty of private capital flying around the real estate industry, making it a great time to be a borrower for some players. Or so say panelists at the MIPIM conference this week in Cannes, France.

“There’s never been a better time to be a borrower,” Laurent Morali, the CEO of Kushner Companies, said Thursday during “The Big Picture for Real Estate Today” panel. “If you’re looking to borrow money to refinance an asset or acquire an asset, you’re going to get a full array of proposals from all types of lenders.”

And it’s not just the rain clouds dispersing in Cannes that left Morali feeling optimistic. Morali said regional banks are coming back to provide leverage to debt funds, while previous panelists said banks have liquidity on their balance sheets to lend.

“As an investor, right now is an amazing time because you have less players willing to deploy capital on the equity side of the equation, you have more liquidity available to borrow from,” Morali said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

(Disclosure: Kushner President Nicole Kushner Meyer is married to Observer Media Chairman Joseph Meyer.)

But not all borrowers are having as easy a time securing debt as developers like Kushner. Sara Queen, managing director and head of real estate equity for MetLife Investment Management, said that borrowers on the construction end of the spectrum have been struggling to get loans.

“Getting that construction lending is a little tougher,” Queen said. “Many of the debt players are not playing in that space.”

Another bump in the road on the construction side is the tariffs the Trump administration imposed on most steel and aluminum imported into the United States — vital supplies for the construction industry. That could upend existing deals MetLife has in the works.

“One of the things that we have to do next week is we have to go back through and [see] whether we locked in rates on steel,” Queen said. “If we haven’t, is it worth continuing to spend money on it if we know it’s not going to pencil?

“We have to really think long and hard, and make sure our clients are well aware of the risks going forward in the current environment,” Queen added.

Morali said that so far Kushner’s projects — which tend to be garden-style apartments that are “very efficient” to build — haven’t seen too much of a dent in pricing, but the effects of tariffs remain to be seen.

“I think that we have access to pretty good pricing and it has not moved that much,” Morali said. “We’re going to see with tariffs that are being imposed right now, because we do sometimes import lumber from Canada, in particular. So we’re going to have to see the impact over the next couple of months.”

But the impact of some of this confusion has people in real estate wondering if the once-popular mantra “Stay alive till `25” was still going to fulfill its promise.

“We got to `25 and we thought, ‘OK, this is going to be the year,’” Queen said. “There’s been a lot of change in the last month, to say the least, and that has made the picture a bit more cloudy.”

While deal activity and commercial mortgage-backed securities issuances have increased in 2025, panelists hedged that neither is back to pre-pandemic levels.

“It’s hardly … back to what we were seeing in the early 2020s,” said Peggy DaSilva, the head of asset management for PIMCO Prime Real Estate in the United States. “Hopefully we’ll get there. Maybe now we need a slogan for 2026.”

Nicholas Rizzi can be reached at nrizzi@commercialobserver.com.