The Mechanic and the Luddite by Dr. Jathan Sadowski

Author:Dr. Jathan Sadowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520398061
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2024-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Mass Automating of Landlords

Let’s close the loop of this chapter by talking about real estate landlords and how they are using digital platforms. There are important areas of convergence and alliance between these different representatives of the rentier class. Just as the dynamics of rentier capitalism are central to the techno-economic model of digital platforms, the technologies of platform capitalism have also become deeply integrated into the real estate industry. Platforms have proven to be powerful tools for buying, selling, renting, and managing real estate—especially residential housing. They ensure the potential value of these financial assets is maximized while the rights of people renting houses are minimized. Here we will see how different forms of capital are working together to reap the benefits of rent extraction, including real estate capital in the form of landed properties, venture capital in the form of digital platforms, and data capital in the form of personal information.35

Critical geographers researching this space of capital convergence have come up with useful concepts for describing different aspects of its operations and impacts. This chapter concludes by discussing this area through the following concepts: (1) platform real estate, which lays out how digital markets are used by property owners and investors to facilitate the commodification and exchange of real estate;36 (2) the automated landlord, which lays out how smart technologies are used by asset managers and corporate landlords to control, oversee, and capture value from rental properties and their tenants;37 and (3) landlords of the internet, which lays out how the core physical infrastructure of data servers and network cables are actually owned and operated by commercial real estate investment trusts.38

This fusion of sectors “provides a backdrop for the material coming-together of real estate’s old ‘organization men’ from the financial offices of Mayfair or the City of London with a newer breed of entrepreneurial technologist-hacker,” writes Joe Shaw.39 While Shaw’s examples are based in the UK and Europe, we can easily replace them with other major hubs of finance, from New York to Hong Kong to Sydney, and the analysis of platform real estate still stands. For example, Dallas Rogers explains how these platform markets have gone global by facilitating the investment of Chinese capital into Australian cities.40 The services provided by these platforms—cultural translation, market automation, legal navigation—are designed to smooth any frictions for the global circulation of real estate capital.41 Real estate is an especially immobile and illiquid asset class. It is physically anchored in specific places, and it takes a lot of time and effort to convert landed property into cash money. However, platforms aim to break these constraints by turning real estate into a free moving “digital, global commodity,”42 while also taking a cut of the action by mediating these capital flows and market exchanges.43

In addition to creating and exchanging assets, digital technologies now play crucial roles in sweating assets—industry jargon for squeezing value out of assets like real estate by spending less to get more. Desiree Fields coined the term automated landlord to

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