FUDA Speaker Series

HYPERSCALING HOUSING: Venture Capital, Real Estate Start-Ups and the Race to Build a Global Residential Brand

What happens when venture capitalists try to reinvent housing in their own image? Synonymous with the rise of Big Tech, venture capitalists (VCs) are asset managers that invest in early‐stage companies, pursuing aggressive growth and market domination. Since the 2008 financial crisis, VCs have poured huge sums into real estate start‐ups. Yet these actors are largely overlooked in the housing financialization literature. 

Attending to this gap, this presentation traces VC‐fuelled attempts to build a globally scaled residential operator. It closely follows investment, acquisition and consolidation activity in the co‐living sector over the past decade, where companies seek expansion via parasitic landlordism: exploiting urban rent-gaps as intermediaries between landlords and tenants. I show how venture capitalists have pushed these start‐ups to pursue hypergrowth in housing markets, rapidly increasing the number of beds under operation and cities covered. But faced with the complex, costly and variegated reality of housing systems, they invariably incur spiralling losses. It is tenants who pay the price, suffering emotionally and financially from the hazards of hypergrowth – from negligence to dispossession.

In all, the talk interrogates a key set of actors underlying the housing‐tech‐finance nexus, and the consequences of their experimentation for households and cities. It calls for closer attention to how investors are reshaping housing markets beyond asset ownership, and to who is financing 'proptech' and why this matters. 

About FUDA: The Financialisation of Urban Development and its Alternatives (FUDA) research cluster, based at the Bartlett School of Planning, critically examines the impacts of financialisation on people and places. It explores how financialisation shapes the development and regeneration of contemporary urban built environments, and the potential for alternative models for imagining and managing urban change. The FUDA Speaker Series invites leading scholars working on these issues to share their latest research.

Speaker information

Tim is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London. His research examines questions of power relating to – and at the intersection of – housing, land, tech and finance.