Unpacking the Corporate Landlord: Changing Financial Networks and the Remaking of Urban Geographies Through the Financialization of Rented Housing

• Richard Goulding – University of Sheffield – r.goulding@sheffield.ac.uk
• Adam Leaver – University of Sheffield
• Jon Silver – University of Sheffield

Housing financialization scholars have documented a rise in corporate landlordism as sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms, REITs and others have moved into residential property markets (Aalbers 2017; Fields, 2019; Wijburg et al., 2018). This development has implications for how we theorise urban geographies, including the evolving relation between local and national state actors as enablers of housing financialization (Beswick and Penny, 2018) and how networks of actors engage in the production of urban space via new models such as Build to Rent (Nethercote, 2020). It also has implications for our understanding of ‘assetization’ processes (Ward and Swyngedouw, 2018), including the entanglement of actors, technologies and valuation practices that give form to these new assets (Brill, 2021; Brill and Özogul, 2021); and how these networks intertwine with techniques such as automation, evictions and credit scoring to reproduce gendered and racialised housing geographies (Fields and Raymond, 2021; cf Joseph, 2014).

This session invites scholars to submit contributions along the following themes:

• Assetization: the changing constellation of expertise, calculative practices and valuation technologies assembled in the process of property asset construction.
• Financialization 2.0?: theorising changes in the networks of financial actors, listed real estate firms, REITs, developers, financialized social housing providers and small-scale investor-landlords engaged in property construction.
• New housing inequalities: how financial networks intertwine with new and old techniques of domination to reproduce unequal housing geographies.
• The different contexts of housing financialization: comparative perspectives on housing financialization, including the use of ‘follow the firm’ methodologies to explore strategies deployed across different networks, cities, sites, and markets.
• Geographies of state capitalism: the restructuring of local and national state objectives and capacities in relation to housing through means including joint ventures, offshoring, land disposals and the management of exposures to financial, legal, and administrative risk.