This article presents the findings of an empirical study investigating refugees' difficult entry into Vienna's 'tight' housing market. Arguing that newcomers' access to housing can be better understood by a closer look at the actors involved in the housing search process, an actor-centred approach is used. Complementing the constructivist pathway framework with a model of search based on Bourdieu's theory of practice, four types of housing entry pathways could be identified. This study draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews with forced migrants who arrived in Austria in recent years. The analysis of newcomers' housing entry pathways not only sheds light on the coordination structures at work in a city of social housing, but also on 'good' and 'bad' rental housing submarkets that have emerged in the course of the recent refugee movement. The paper concludes that a high proportion of social housing does not provide any indication that newcomers are granted better access to secure affordable housing.

This article sheds light on the investment-driven construction sector in Vienna and provides a critique of the Austrian rental investment product Vorsorgewohnung (VSW), a tax-saving investment construction primarily aimed at small private investors. Building on 'new' new economic sociology and a performative take on markets, the focus is on the social construction and the making of a market around this product. The transformation of housing into an investment product is examined by drawing on the advertising discourse, especially the VSW-market makers' webites. The negative effects of financialized housing production on the micro and urban level are also discussed. Against economic common sense, it is argued that the VSW market is not a 'natural' matter of a given demand and supply, but the product of a twofold social construction to which the Austrian state and the local banks make a significant contribution. What appears rational and advantageous from the investors' individual point of view is, in various ways, a disadvantage for the urban community.

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If we want to understand why housing is increasingly becoming a global investment product and the subject of surplus consumption, we must also look at the advertising infrastructures and image products that have been profoundly transformed by new digital technologies. This article examines the promotional staging of luxury and investment apartments using the example of websites that advertise upscale new construction projects in Vienna. The central question is how, and with which forms of aesthetic staging, processes of emotional and temporal entanglement are set in motion. For the analysis, Gernot Böhme’s theory of aesthetic economy and concepts of ANT-informed economic sociology are used. It is argued that breathtakingly realistic architectural renderings should not only be seen as representations, but as ‘market devices’ which, together with the technical-digital environment in which they are embedded, (co-)shape our affects, our desire and our consumer behaviour. The aesthetic work that is invested in the online staging of residential real estate does not simply serve to better imagine buildings not yet built, but rather to sell apartments at an ever earlier date – thus to accelerate the capital turnover.