Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation

By Desiree Fields. Environment and Planning, 2019

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article centers the role of digital technologies in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the US housing market in the wake of the global financial crisis. I argue that while post-crisis market conditions provided an opportunity for large investors to acquire foreclosed single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and roll out an new asset class based on bundled rent checks, these conditions were insufficient on their own. Digital innovations coming to prominence since the 2008 crisis were required to automate core functions, such as rent collection and maintenance, in order to efficiently manage large, geographically dispersed property portfolios. New information technologies enabled investors to aggregate ownership of resources, extract income flows, and securely convey these flows to capital markets. Such advances have, therefore, given rise to the “automated landlord”, whereby the management of tenants and properties is increasingly not only mediated, but governed, by smartphones, digital platforms, and apps, and the data and analytics these devices and infrastructures gather and enable. This article shows how technological transformations actively participate in the ongoing, dynamic process of financial accumulation strategies, and contends that digital technologies, therefore, also comprise a crucial terrain of struggles over housing’s place in contemporary capitalism.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0952c2e23a51ee650ca268ab748b70122cf6f08e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. M. Nethercote
2. Karen P. Y. Lai
3. M. Samers
4. Jathan Sadowski
5. Geoff Boeing

In Finance

1. Karen P. Y. Lai
2. M. Samers
3. M. Nethercote
4. Jathan Sadowski
5. Geoff Boeing

In Urban Studies

1. M. Nethercote
2. Karen P. Y. Lai
3. M. Samers
4. Jathan Sadowski
5. Geoff Boeing

Citations in the corpus

• Build-to-Rent and the financialization of rental housing: future research directions (2020, background): “As Fields (2019) argues, although post-crisis market conditions provided novel investment opportunities, the subsequent expansion of institutional investors into rental markets coincided with important post-2008 digital innovations.”
• Towards an economic geography of FinTech (2020, background): “Indeed, research into the digital transformation of rental housing market as a new asset class in the USA (Fields, 2019) and the platform lending in the UK and the USA (Anderson et al., 2020; Clarke, 2019) demonstrate the importance of new and reconfigured geographies of FinTech-enabled financial…”
• The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism (2020, methodology): “The unique challenges faced by these “ global corporate landlords ” (Bes-wick et al. 2016) — or, private equity fi rms that securitise the rental income from thousands of rental properties that are geographically dispersed — has given rise to “ the automated landlord ” (Fields 2019).”
• Online rental housing market representation and the digital reproduction of urban inequality (2019, background): “Inequality in the housing information landscape Housing technology platforms today forge emerging institutions with the capacity to reshape urban economies, human interactions, and information landscapes (Fields, 2019; Jiao and Bai, 2019; Kim et al., 2019; Shaw, 2018; Wegmann and Jiao, 2017).”