How does the struggle to define homes value drive transformation of the post-crisis national housing finance? The case of Sweden.

This article centers the role of the socio-technical organization of housing transactions in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the housing market and the structuring of the housing finance. The analysis is based on the case of Sweden – a country where housing indebtedness is one of the highest in the world and where home sale workflows, coupled with their mortgaging procedures, have recently undergone a major transformation (Proskurovska & Dörry, upcoming). I argue, that the current socio-technical arrangements were largely shaped by a longer trajectory of attempts to harmonise valuation practices of homes owned directly and indirectly, that is, tenant-owned homes. This effort was vital to ensure the comparability of mortgage debt secured on these different types of collateral but has evidenced different and frequently contending outcomes. On the one hand, it helped to expand financial accumulation into tenant-owned housing sectors, boosting housing price growth along with household indebtedness. On the other hand, it created the ambivalent reality in which the state’s capacity to ensure financial stability and regulate the exposure of housing cooperatives and its member-households to credit risk, relies on housing valuations performed by increasingly autonomous private agents. I conclude with a discussion of limitations that such methodological focus on geographically embedded transactional practices, their outcomes and socio-technical organization implies. However, I also highlight its contribution to a better understanding of neoliberal urban transformations and the mechanisms through which financialisation of residential real estate occurs.