Novel Institutional Investors in Post-Crisis Housing Markets

tenants.” (Beswick et al., 2015: 324). (2) The abilities of these actors to raise “capital from large institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies” (Beswick et al., 2015:323), with an ability to leverage further loans from financial institutions, and (3) this access to large pools of capital enables the acquisition of large property portfolios, restricting furthering insecure forms of tenancy through monopolisation of rental markets. (Beswick et al., 2015)

These institutional investors are “predatory “formations”, a mix of elites and systemic capacities with finance a key enabler, that push toward acute concentration.” (Sassen, 2018:16-17). The novelty of post-crisis financialisation is found in “the nature of the flows of capital which characterise the post-crisis context.” (Beswick et al., 2016: 329):

“In short, diverse facets of the financial-real estate complex are being concentrated in one set of global actors who are gaining control of both direct property assets and financial assets linked to property.” (Beswick et al., 2016: 329)

The entrance of these actors dually defines post-crisis financialisation radicality of housing by (1) the dimensions, which are “proportionate to the massive concentration and availability of global financial capital today” (Rolnik, 2019:267), and (2) “the velocity, directly derived from technological revolution, of value representation, in online and real-time interactions, in increasingly abstract circuits that no longer have any connection to the social works embedded into built space.” (Rolnik, 2019:267 emphasis added) Where “[r]ental properties have emerged as a major new ‘asset class’ for the new breed of investor” (Beswick et al., 2016:329) in postcrisis financialised housing landscapes.

De-territorialisation of Extraction

Dimensionality and velocity of post-crisis financialisation are evidenced in Fields’ study which argues that the transformation from ownership models of housing to rental hegemonies were

realised through invention of novel financial instruments facilitating mass acquisition and management of foreclosed properties for rental adaptation. Automated property management operations “relied on logistical extractive digital interventions” (Fields, 2019:5), adopting Fordist production logics for the deployment of a new asset class, where “this model ensured access to a steady supply of raw materials (mortgages) for the mass production of financial assets, eliminated middlemen, and enabled rent extraction [...] throughout the process.” (Goldstein and Fligstein, 2017 cited in Fields, 2019:5) Post-crisis Fordist modes of vertically integrated housing production enabled firms to internalise “supply chains and scale economies [for the] production of financial instruments” (Fields, 2019:8) using “information technology platforms”. (Fields, 2018:9) Creation of novel instruments for capital accumulation couples the materialisation of capital for financial extraction with the reformulation of housing markets from owner-occupier to rental hegemonies. (Fields, 2019 Rolnik, 2019) In Fields’ study, digital advancements for mass property acquisition and management emerge revealing de-territorialised tactics of accumulation nessicating an analytical inclusion of:

“forms or modes of existence of capital rather than on “structures” [which] allows us to supersede subject-object dualism, and henceforth capture the universal content that is expressed through the unfolding processes through their concrete manifestation in the situated, affective fabrics of human and non human existence”. (Arboleda, 2020: 15)

During the post-crisis “era of increasing dominance of rent extraction over productive capital” (Rolnik, 2019:16), these vast networks of financial servicing infrastructures facilitate capital extraction “from a set of activities, forms of cooperation and from the obligations of a future capacity to labour.” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017:578) Requiring expanded definitions of ‘extraction’ and ‘extractivism’ as:

“[c]urrent and developing technologies of extraction have extended the terrain of extraction beyond the limits of what we consider extractive industry and transformed it in ways that require rethinking the materiality, spatiality, and temporality of extraction” (Labban, 2014:561)

Incorporating revised definitions of ‘extraction’ and ‘extractivism’ informs the methodology of this dissertation through concentration upon the modes of capital operation materialising discrete architectures formulated as post-crisis housing solutions, where these ‘solutions’ act as sites of