Real estate launched Trump. It also could hurt him in 2020.

In addition to 2008, declines in the housing market were tied to recessions in 1974, 1980 and 1990-91, raising concerns that history is about to repeat.One area where housing-market stress is obvious is the one Trump knows best: High-end apartments in Manhattan, where prices are now dropping as foreign buyers disappear and wealthy residents flee to lower-tax states.“When you look at the New York metro area, we are moving from an extended period of stagnation to one of outright softening,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, U.S. The race for 2020 starts now. The largest in-migration states over that period — Florida, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina — have lower taxes.The tax-law change isn’t the only thing hurting Trump’s beloved luxury real estate market in New York, according to Donna Olshan, whose firm tracks contracts signed at $4 million and above in Manhattan.“The luxury market has been slowly coming down since its peak in 2013, 2014, 2015,” she said. The oversupply — combined with stock market volatility, the wane in some foreign-buyer demand and the tax changes — is “eroding the luxury market,” Olshan said.Weakness in overseas economies is contributing to woes in U.S. housing.“Ten years ago the U.S. housing bust caused the Great Recession. The sale of homes worth $2 million or more grew just 7 percent from 2017 to 2018, compared with 21 percent growth from 2016 to 2017, according to Attom data.The breadth of the high-end lag suggests it’s not just the state and local tax issue, Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said.“I think it’s the combination of the general slowing of economic activity, the modest rise in interest rates and the volatility of the market in the fourth quarter,” Duncan said. Two percentage points, or a little over 20 percent, of the nine-percentage-point drop can be attributed to the increase in student-loan debt over that time period, the Fed found — “represent[ing] over 400,000 young individuals who would have owned a home in 2014 had it not been for the rise in debt.”Taken together, the declines in high-end markets and across states hit by the tax law changes — coupled with affordability problems for new buyers and reduced construction of new homes — suggest that the market could contribute to the next recession and make life difficult for Trump.