Platform Real Estate: theory and practice of new urban real estate markets

By Joe Shaw. Urban Geography, 2018

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Recent years have witnessed a surge in the development of digital real estate technologies. Often referred to as PropTech (property technology), these innovations might variously promise more efficient portfolio management (e.g. VTS), new ways to rent accommodation (e.g. Airbnb), or hassle-free maintenance (e.g. FixFlo). Whilst commentators have debated their novelty as either highly disruptive or a temporary fad, few researchers have sought to fully theorize the digital real estate platform. And those that have provided overviews of the so-called PropTech landscape have failed to do so in a sufficiently critical manner, instead opting for a raft of essentialist and categorical terms. Borrowing the lenses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and platform studies, this paper develops a theory of digital real estate platforms to address this conceptual gap. And through a qualitative analysis of some 400 businesses, it provides a series of key observations of Platform Real Estate as an improved theoretical neologism to inform future research. These observations are important to better understand the nature of digital real estate platforms and the manner in which they may reconstruct future urban real estate markets – a subject of great concern to researchers and market participants alike.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Economics and Econometrics, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31f488d4f9b71fd12640198ff6323b22caaf6e1f

How researchers see this paper

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

In Automotive Engineering

1. M. Nethercote
2. Jathan Sadowski
3. Desiree Fields

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jathan Sadowski
2. M. Nethercote
3. Desiree Fields
4. Gertjan Wijburg

In Marketing

1. M. Nethercote
2. Jathan Sadowski
3. Desiree Fields

Citations in the corpus

• Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation (2019, background): “Furthermore, if we recognize housing as a crucial vector of social inequality and “the immense power and capital at stake in real estate markets” (Marcuse and Madden, 2016; Shaw, 2018: 6), digital technologies must be understood as part of the terrain of current and future housing politics.”
• Build-to-Rent and the financialization of rental housing: future research directions (2020, background): “These research gaps are explained in part by the relative infancy of ‘PropTech’ or ‘platform real estate’ itself, and its associated scholarship (Shaw, 2018), but are worthy avenues for future inquiry to better understand how BtR deploys digital technologies to render multi-unit rental more…”
• The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism (2020, methodology): “This incipient area has been explored via two recent but signi fi cant concepts: “ platform real estate ” (Shaw 2018) and “ the automated landlord ” (Fields 2019).”