This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors. A recurring critique in recent years has been the minimal acknowledgment of investor heterogeneity particularly in relation to urban development and the financialization of housing. Yet, to date, there is no systematic evidence supporting these contentions. Therefore, we conducted an exhaustive literature review of residential investment landscapes through the Web of Science citation database in the following fields: Urban and regional planning, geography, sociology, urban studies, public administration, and economics. Subsequently, we methodically searched for the types of investors addressed, and investor categories employed, in journal articles published between 2000 and 2019. Following a meta-categorization of the results, we demonstrate how existing literature differentiates investors in terms of their spatial scale of operation, size and social composition, investment object and finance, or investment and social behavior. Additionally, we highlight the key topics and issues addressed in the reviewed literature within each meta-category. We propose to turn the four meta-categories into a multidimensional analytical framework as a point of departure for a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of investor differentiations, a tool that is urgently needed in Planning Studies and related disciplines. Furthermore, we argue that mixed method approaches combining hard and quantifiable with soft behavioral investor characteristics, as well as institutional analyses combining structural considerations with actors’ agency, are indispensable to disentangle contemporary residential property market dynamics.

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the 'legal instrumentalisation' of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they 'co-exist' in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.

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Shifts in property markets are closely tied to changes in investment actors’ relations, shaped by wider economic and regulatory processes. However, the existing literature generally neglects the role of actors’ behaviour and agency within property market shifts, and how market shifts affect cities. In response, we establish a framework that systematically unpacks the role, characteristics and behaviour of property investors in investment market shifts within urban development. We consider market shifts as modifications to established economic and regulatory processes and argue that a multidimensional approach is required to understand property investors and their role within property investment markets that shapes the urban built environment. Our main contribution is a novel approach and methodology to read changing property investor landscapes by linking wider economic and regulatory changes to investment actors and their investment strategies. Empirically, we focus on Amsterdam’s changing investor landscape over the last 15 years. We investigate how crises, represented by far-reaching institutional disruptions of economic and regulatory systems, relate to Amsterdam’s landscape of property investors. Correspondingly, we define three distinct periods of analysis, based on transaction volumes and regulatory interventions at national and local levels: the pre-global financial crisis (GFC) period from 2005 to 2008, the post-GFC recovery period from 2009 to 2013, and the pre-Covid19 boom period from 2014 to 2020. We reveal how Amsterdam’s investor landscape changed over the course of these periods through a mixed methods analysis, including quantitative investment transaction analysis, mapping, and in-depth interviews with investors. We ultimately suggest that reading property market shifts through multidimensional characteristics would enable more targeted policy solutions, moving away from empirically ill-supported stereotypes of property actor behaviours.

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