This weekend, four days after the presidential election was held, several media outlets called the state of Pennsylvania for former Vice President Joe Biden. He had won its electoral votes and along with them, the presidency. President Donald Trump has not conceded and has promised to use legal action to contest the votes in several battleground states. It is debatable, however, how successful these efforts will be. Meanwhile, the nation still waits to see which party will take the Senate, with two runoff races in Georgia scheduled for January 2021.

And so the political contours of the next four years starts to take shape for the commercial real estate industry. Much will depend on the fate of the Senate, of course, but there are some areas that the industry can already guess will see change.

Assuming the Senate stays in Republican hands, Biden will not be able to pass any sweeping tax measures that would affect the industry, such as the elimination of the 1031 exchange. But he has made clear that he plans to issue a flurry of executive orders to roll back measures put in place by his predecessor and re-establish rules that had been in place in the Obama Administration. This will begin on day one, he has vowed. Biden is likely to focus on bigger issues first such as reversing the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and repealing the travel ban from Muslim countries. But  with the executive agencies back in Democratic control, there are a myriad of regulations expected to eventually come that will affect housing and finance.