Tag Archive for: housing

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1230 | The rise of corporate hosts in the short-term rental market and its impact on housing and places | Sònia Vives-Miró (1); Agustín Cocola-Gant (2); Christian Smigiel (3); Alejandro Armas-Díaz (4)

Platform capitalism is transforming housing markets worldwide. The platform real estate industry has grown in size, number of actors as well as in financial dimension. In fact, it already consists of more than 600 privately held companies with a market valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollar. The short-term rental (STR) market illustrates the descripted transformation. While being an informal activity early on, STR has transitioned to a consolidated industry. Beyond platforms the sector is now formed by a myriad of market actors, and this professionalization is evident in the large ecosystem of companies that have developed around the industry. STR companies mainly are property managers that are supported by start-ups offering software and digital innovation to manage large portfolios and secure high occupancy rates. Professionalization has implied two interlinked phenomena.
1) The first one is the attractiveness of the sector to institutional investors. While in the early stages, hosts were predominantly individual owners, more and more corporate landlords are active in this market. The professionalization of management and the availability of market data to predict future revenues make STRs a feasible product for institutional investors to diversify their portfolio.
2) Second, it is interesting to see how the STR have globalized. To start with, several management companies have become transnational firms as they have been backed by venture capital to expand. The rise of on-demand software and, in particular, Property Management Systems (PMS), makes it increasingly easy for global companies to land in different places and expand geographically.
These phenomena have not been explored in detail so far and we believe they are crucial in terms of understanding global inequalities, housing market dynamics, and regulation. We invite authors to discuss how the professionalization will impact housing markets in cities and rural areas in different places.
In this panel we welcome contributions that provide new theoretical approaches, methodological insights and empirical analyses that help to understand the above processes and their economic, social, and political impacts by addressing questions such as:
– How do intermediaries shape STR markets and labour conditions?
– How can the professionalization of service providers and the entry of financial investors into the STR market be conceptualized and practically captured?
– What methods help critical researchers to address their sense of self in relation to the emerging field of research and to take an active role in the argument about the just city? We plan a 90 minutes session with four presentations (15 minutes each) followed with Q&A and a final discussion. The session will be held in English.

Sònia Vives-Miró (1); Agustín Cocola-Gant (2); Christian Smigiel (3); Alejandro Armas-Díaz (4)
(1) Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain), (2) Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal), (3) Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg (Austria), (4) Universität Leipzig (Germany)

 
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1226 | Persistencies and transformations in the private residential rental market | Casier Charlotte (1); Périlleux Hugo (2); Dawance Thomas (3)

Research on housing since the financial crisis of 2008-2012 has largely been thought of in terms of the financialisation of real estate. Many researchers have documented how housing, chunky a and spatially fixed, has been turned into a ’unitized’ and liquid quasi-financial asset through a combination of regulatory and socio-technical changes (Aalbers, 2019).Housing has become a major object of financialization, through rising mortgage debt, mortgage securitization, the financialization of construction and development companies, and the growing grip of finance on the private rental market (Aalbers, 2019 ; Romainville, 2015). Thus, this consequent literature details how the extraction of real estate rent not only represents the source of profit for the real estate industry, but increasingly constitutes large shares of the returns of financial institutions (Aalbers, 2012).,Authors have, however, shown a simultaneous resurgence of ‘landlordism’ or private landlords in rental property ownership in several context (Ronald, Kadi, 2018, Aalbers, 2021 ; Hochstenbach et al., 2021).
These studies, whether they focus on institutional actors or smaller-scale landlords, address the question of “who benefits from rental housing” but actually offer little insight into the formation of this profit. Theories of rent, which allow us to understand how (and not who) profits from rental housing, have been largely neglected by research. However, understanding the process of land rent formation in the urban context remains relevant, in the sense that it feeds the capital invested in the financialisation of real estate (Harvey, 1982 ; Lipietz, 1974 ; Topalov, 1977, 1984). In recent years, there has been renewed interest in using the rent theory to analyse urban dynamics (Haila, 1990, 2016 ; Revington, 2021 ; Ward and Aalbers, 2016).
Furthermore, the geography of the private rental market has been little studied in detail. However, it could be argued that types of actors involved vary spatially as well as the different modalities and magnitude of the rent received. Literature remains scarce on intra-urban geographies according to these parameters.
We aim to contribute to debates regarding persistences and transformations of the private rental market by focusing on the supply side and on landlords. In particular, we will give importance to spatial approaches, giving the opportunity to connect these results to wider processes of urban transformation. We are considering three lines of communication: (1) actors of the residential rental market, (2) creation of rental sub-markets, (3) (non-)regulation/alternatives. This session is organised in association with a special issue of BELGEO, the Belgian Journal of Geography (https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/56687). Proposers are invited to submit to both but without obligation. Papers may be presented in English or French.

Casier Charlotte (1); Périlleux Hugo (2); Dawance Thomas (3)
(1) ULB-FNRS, (2) ULB, (3) VUB

 
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