Follow the Firm: Analyzing the International Ascendance of Build to Rent

abstract

Economic geography and housing studies have begun to grapple with how institutional investment operates and impacts particular cities or sites. There has been less attention to the ways in which institutional investment functions across different scales: the theorization of financialization has, to date, left unaddressed the ways in which global or international actors confront multiple scales of corporate strategy, politics, and markets. In this article we utilize a firm-level analysis to engage with the financialization of rental housing in two cities, by following a residential landlord’s entrance into professionalized private residential rental—build to rent (BTR)—markets in London and Amsterdam. Conceptually, we develop a firm-centered approach for analyzing the multiscalar nature of financing BTR to rent housing. This approach combines valuable insights from work on the firm in economic geography and critical perspectives from the wider spatial sciences, to fully grasp a firm’s behavior in relation to the wider political institutional dynamics. We reveal how the firm’s multiscalar corporate strategies interact with highly territorialized systems of regulation and governance in both cities. Despite different market dynamics in London and Amsterdam, in both cities the firm mitigates risk by entering the market via student housing; it acquires local knowledge, and it establishes meaningful connections with private local actors and policy makers. These insights, we contend, contribute to the theorization of financialization by demonstrating the multiscalar nature of the processes embedded within it.

Key words:

• follow the firm
• build to rent
• institutional finance
• London
• Amsterdam
• financialization

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by ESRC, award number ES/S015078/1 and the Dutch Research Council NWO, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek award number 464.18.113. Parts of this argument were presented at the RSA 2019, and we would like to thank the audience for their questions at that time. We would also like to thank Tuna Tasan-Kok and Mike Raco for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ https://www.rcanalytics.com is a commercial database with limited public access. Additional data is available from the authors upon request.

² = €4.1 billion.

³ https://gdpr-info.eu.

⁴ = €7.3 billion.

⁵ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-planning-policy-framework–2.

⁶ https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/m28_greystar_0069.pdf.

⁷ https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0020449/2018-07-01.

⁸ https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0027431/2021-01-01.

⁹ https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0005181/2021-04-01.