Pushing housing hyper-commodification: how new rental market intermediaries capture flows of labour and capital under platform capitalism

The technological boom concomitant to the Global Financial Crisis has enabled platform capitalism and provided tools to break with the illiquidity of real estate, while stimulating the emergence of new rental segments to capture increasingly mobile labour and capital flows. We frame these short-term, flexible rental housing segments catering to young expatriate workers, supplied through online platforms and managed by professional companies as Hyper-Commodified Housing Products (HCHPs). We investigate how their instigators – and the digital instruments they use – contribute to the hyper-commodification of housing. To do so, we explore the development strategies, behaviours and interactions of new market intermediaries, in light of Deleuze & Guattari’s twofold movement of de- and reterritorialisation underpinning capitalism. Drawing on the recent development in Luxembourg of two main types of HCHPs – co-living and corporate short-term rentals – and using mixed empirical material, we show how HCHPs and their instigators work to capture and reconcile decoded flows of labour and capital, by channelling tenants into predetermined housing pathways in dedicated rental segments. We thus argue that HCHPs are the artificial reterritorialisation of increasingly decoded capital and labour flows under platform capitalism in a digitally-enabled, ‘unavoidable’ asset, which incrementally pushes hyper-commodification one step further.