HYPERSCALING HOUSING: Venture Capital, Real Estate Start‐Ups and the Race to Build a Global Residential Brand

What the paper says

What happens when venture capitalists try to reinvent housing in their own image? Synonymous with the rise of Big Tech, venture capitalists (VCs) are asset managers that invest in early‐stage companies, pursuing aggressive growth and market domination. Since the 2008 financial crisis, VCs have poured huge sums into real estate start‐ups. Yet these actors are largely overlooked in the housing financialization and platform real estate literature. Attending to this gap, this article traces VC‐fuelled attempts to build a globally scaled residential operator. It closely follows investment, acquisition and consolidation activity in the co‐living sector over the past decade, where companies seek expansion via parasitic landlordism: exploiting urban rent‐gaps as intermediaries between landlords and tenants. I show how venture capitalists have pushed these start‐ups to rapidly increase the number of beds under operation and cities covered. But, faced with the complex, costly and variegated reality of housing systems, they invariably incur spiraling losses. It is tenants who pay the price, suffering emotionally and financially from the hazards of hyperscaling—from negligence to dispossession. In all, the article interrogates a key set of actors underlying the housing‐tech‐finance nexus, and the consequences of their experimentation for households and cities. It calls for closer attention to how investors are reshaping housing markets beyond asset ownership, and to who is financing ʻproptech’ and why this matters.