Towards a Critical Housing Studies Research Agenda on Platform Real Estate

Abstract

The pace and scope of digital innovation targeting the real estate industry has intensified over the past decade. This article is therefore concerned with the digitization of the residential real estate industry, and how critical housing scholars might shape a research agenda on this transformation. We set out platform logic, digital labor, and financialization as a conceptual vocabulary for studying new digital modalities of real estate practice. Platform logic highlights questions of power and politics relating to the data collection capacities potentially obscured by platforms' convenience and ease of use. Digital labor points to how platform real estate may change relationships among incumbent real estate professionals, investors and property owners, and tenants and residents. Financialization shifts the focus to how digital platforms participate in the contemporary political economy of housing. The article concludes with an agenda for critical housing research on digital real estate platforms ARTICLE HISTORY

Moving towards a Smarter Housing Market: The Example of Poland

“…In relation to the housing market, digitalisation largely concerns the use of digital housing platforms [34] through which the process of renting or selling a flat is much easier and sometimes done entirely online. Conversely, digitisation in the context of the housing market refers to the coding in a digital version of residential property attributes [35] such as location, size, standard etc. It should also be stressed that the digitisation of properties is extremely important from the point of view of other areas of the real estate industry.…”

Property as technology

“…Today' s innovation of inequity in the realm platform urbanism and housing is particularly salient amidst the growing category of platform real estate and proptech. This includes an array of entanglements between real estate, technology, law enforcement, and venture capital, including the development and management of smart buildings, the 'amenitization' of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, and new mechanisms of building acquisition and tenant screening (Fields and Rogers 2019;Shaw 2018). Screening and management systems include surveillance techniques used to monitor occupants and potential residents.…”

“…This, in turn, has incited the dislocation of countless poor and working-class residents of color amidst a technological landscape often portrayed as liberal and benign (Atanasoski and Vora 2019;Ramírez 2019;Schafran 2018;Shange 2019). At the same time, there has been a boom in 'smart city' construction, platform urbanism, platform real estate, and property technology (known as proptech in the real estate industry) in order to automate landlordism, property management, acquisition, zoning, and planning (Fields 2019;Fields and Rogers 2019;Leszczynski 2019;Shaw 2018). These platforms too contribute to contexts of gentrification, automating pre-existent racial biases regarding property and tenancy, while capitalizing upon data (Crawford et al 2019;McElroy 2019a).…”

What's wrong with investment apartments? On the construction of a ‘financialized’ rental investment product in Vienna

“…This is not only due to the low interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the 'lack of investment alternatives'. Also the infrastructure for financial and investment advice which has grown strongly since the 1990s, digital technologies and the associated new forms of coordination and marketing ('platform real estate', Fields & Rogers, 2019) have contributed to the increase in VSW. Just like the fact that market makers with their essentialist marketing discourse permeate all public media (on the online edition of the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, for example, the managing director of Raiffeisen Vorsorge Wohnungen 'explains' VSW in three videos under the heading 'real estate basics').…”