Making home in Build-to-Rent: an investigation into the financialization of London’s private rented sector and the emergence of a new ‘willing’ renter subject

Laxton, Alexander Michael (2022). Making home in Build-to-Rent: an investigation into the financialization of London’s private rented sector and the emergence of a new ‘willing’ renter subject. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis addresses the growth of academic interest in the financialization of global rental markets in the decade following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Within this field of scholarship, the recent growth of institutional investments in the UK’s Build-to-Rent (BTR) market have remained something of a lacuna. Informed by the growing influence of the global Prop-Tech ‘revolution’, the thesis explores the implications of the BTR co-living market as both an economic and cultural event, extending an earlier round of literature which focussed on the financialization of everyday life and home. Adopting a post-structuralist lens, the thesis draws together scholarship on the financialization of housing, platform real estate and work on the geographies of home and youth studies, to explore the lived realities of these new rental markets. Based upon interviews with market experts and young renters, and a lengthy ethnographic account of life within the market, the thesis articulates the coming together of technology and real estate around a new rental home assemblage and ‘willing renter’ subject. Understanding the lived experience of young renters is crucial to understanding their position in a globally orientated market promising opportunity and connectivity, while frequently aligning with precarity and instability. Posing a range of questions on the nature of the rental homes of the present and future, institutionally funded private rental housing holds the promise of further entrenching asymmetries of financial and land control.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):