Housing hyper-commodification: strategies and discourses of new market intermediaries

Housing regimes have undergone dramatic transformations post-Global Financial Crisis, under combined processes of financialisation, assetisation and platformisation. Concomitantly, real estate and capital accumulation have come to dominate housing provision – a process that Madden and Marcuse have named ‘hyper-commodification’. In this talk, I identify co-living and corporate short-term rentals – i.e., short to mid-term, flexible and digitally-enabled rental housing segments catering primarily to young expatriate workers and managed by professional companies – as ‘hyper-commodified housing products’. I argue that the hyper-commodification of rental housing is, at the surface level, sold as a response to a triple crisis that bridges state, market and society: it favours talent attraction, increases profitability and eases access to housing. At a deeper level, however, these products are symptomatic of housing regimes combining entrepreneurial governance, accumulation through property and housing depoliticisation. I examine housing hyper-commodification in Luxembourg, a small European country considered a liberal housing regime. Luxembourg’s housing market is characterised by high property prices and ownership concentration, resulting in fragmented access to homeownership, an inaccessible private-rented sector, and scarce public housing. After presenting the types and geography of hyper-commodified rental housing in Luxembourg, I unravel the mutually exclusive outcomes promised by their instigators, as new market actors intermediating housing provision. I further show how these actors strategically capture flows of labour and capital by channelling tenants into predetermined housing pathways in dedicated rental segments, which nevertheless incrementally push housing hyper-commodification one step further.