Hyper-commodified rental housing: Emergence of short-term, shared and digitized housing products as new accumulation modes in Luxembourg.

In the context of a structural, global housing crisis, real estate actors have developed flexible urban housing products branded as experiential and transitional living solutions for young mobile workers. These emerging housing forms—further referred to as ‘hyper-commodified housing products’ (HCHPs)—result from both the institutionalization and professionalization of short-term and shared housing arrangements using digitized management. HCHPs primarily target young workers recruited by international firms and attractive to local states. However, these new housing forms have been associated with increasing housing prices and exclusive tenant selection processes, which may fuel housing exclusion, contribute to decreasing access to homeownership and jeopardize social cohesion. In Luxembourg, HCHPs have nevertheless been appealing to the real estate sector and public authorities. By asking why and how HCHPs are developed and often actively supported, the HypeRent project aims to understand the emergence of these products and inform policymakers about their risks, using Luxembourg as a case study.
Starting from changing accumulation regimes, the HCHP concept covers co-living and short-term rentals in the buy-to-let sector, and purpose-built student accommodation and high-density shared housing in the build-to-rent sector. The project will embrace a transversal, comprehensive and multi-faceted approach to understand how HCHPs both result from and contribute to what is considered a triple crisis—particularly prominent in Luxembourg—of attractiveness for the state, supply for the real estate market, and affordability and accessibility for tenants. The research design will link each crisis dimension to the perspective of a particular actor and specific objectives that will be achieved using mainly qualitative methods and a data collection strategy comprising case studies at several spatial scales and multiple information sources to generate useable evidence.
The first objective is to understand how market actors develop HCHPs, their strategies, behaviors, and nteractions. To do so, the project will establish a typology of actors and products, using desk research, web scrapping and GIS. Then, idealtypical actor landscapes will be generated from the analysis of online material and semi-structured interviews. The second objective will focus on understanding the interests (or misgivings) leading different levels of government to support (or hinder) specific HCHPs. The project will combine semi-structured interviews with public actors and the analysis of policies, regulations and strategies, from the national to the real estate project level, to identify the instruments that translate government support for (or opposition to) HCHPs’ development. The project’s third objective is to explore the effects of the digitized tenant selection and management processes on tenants’ live-work pathways (e.g., residential and career constrained choices) and discuss how HCHPs worsen housing exclusion and inequality. Using social media posts, marketing content and tenant interviews, the project will characterize these processes and their role in tenants’ live-work pathways. Finally, the findings from each part will be assembled to discuss the mechanisms that enable HCHPs to emerge
as responses to structural issues in housing markets while eventually fueling exclusion and inequality patterns.
The HypeRent project will thus contribute to understanding the strategies and behaviors of little-known real estate
intermediaries, government support for emerging housing forms, and the effects of these developments for tenants in terms of exclusion and inequality. These findings will help policymakers take measures that consistently apply to different products with similar effects. Such measures would strengthen governments’ steering capacity over HCHPs' development and improve housing affordability and accessibility overall.