A burgeoning literature demonstrates how the interdependent relationship between the financial and real estate sectors has intensified boom-bust dynamics within urban property markets. Indeed, following the financial crisis of 2008, this articulation of increased financial risk within cities has been evidenced in the avalanche of distressed property assets and debt that accompanied the collapse of property markets internationally. However, while research has focused on the causes of the crash and its economic, social and political impacts, knowledge is less developed regarding how the link between finance and the built environment is being re-established. How are the circuits of capital into distressed property markets being rebooted in post-crisis contexts and what are the implications for the existing political economy? In response, this article explores the development of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) market in Ireland as part of a wider effort to deleverage the country's failed banking sector and to attract global, yield-seeking capital into the moribund property market. Despite their location at the nexus between financial and real estate markets, REITs have not figured highly in critical geographic discussion of the financialization of real estate. This article addresses this gap by contextualising the history, politics and geography of REITs and by stressing their urban dimensions, as well as demonstrating how they are capitalizing on the deleveraging of the Irish banking and development sectors in the interests of global financial investors.

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Following the financial crisis, an extensive literature has examined the vulnerabilities facing mortgagors in default and foreclosure. However, in addition to these 'overt casualties' of the crash, many households are struggling to meet their mortgage payments by enduring severe cutbacks to their quality of life. The experiences of these 'unrevealed casualties' of the financial crisis and the coping strategies they employ to respond to mortgage stress remain under-explored. Drawing on survey data of Irish mortgagors (n=433), this paper examines the impacts of mortgage stress upon quality of life and mortgagors' coping strategies to respond to their financial difficulties. The findings suggest that mortgage stress affects a broader range of households than previously considered; mortgage stressed households adopt a range of expenditure, employment, finance and housingrelated responses; and more punitive responses correlate with greater mortgage stress levels, thereby providing a fuller account of the real cost of coping with the crisis impacts.

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Drawing upon the Irish case, this article explores the interaction between the financialized economy and the urban planning system. While considerable scholarship has examined the financialization of real estate, it remains unclear how planning systems are being repurposed to facilitate a finance-led regime of urban growth or how the 'real estatefinancial complex' seeks to enact planning policy transformations that support its interests. This article explores how such actors have advanced the concept of 'financial viability of development' as a means of influencing the post-crisis re-regulation of Irish planning policy. This group has argued that housing construction in post-crash Ireland is unviable given the high development finance costs, onerous planning gain contributions and the lack of development certainty in the planning process. As such, housing construction has been at an all-time-low, leading to a new crisis in affordable housing provision. In response, a complicit state has further liberalized the planning system, introducing an array of policies that are evermore facilitative of development interests. Empirical findings, based on interviews with developers, lobbyists and planners, emphasize the importance of informal access to policymakers, the wielding of 'expert knowledge' and media management to co-opt the state into adopting financial viability within planning policymaking.