The social lives of rental proptech: Entanglements between capitalist, care and techno-utopian values

Abstract

Housing’s value is contested, with discussions including the economic value of housing through literature on assetisation and financialisation, social value in debates about housing as a human right, value capture in infrastructure development, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing, tenants and Proptech are valued by tenant advocates, real estate professionals, and proptech developers in Sydney, Australia. This is not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing or Proptech, but to recognise and engage with the ways various social, digital and financial valuations of housing, tenants and digital technologies inform a situated and relational politics of Proptech value. As such we advance a ‘more-than-political’ economy of Proptech. To illustrate this conceptual case, we discuss three regimes of rental Proptech value in Australia – capitalist and economic regimes; social capital through an ethic of care; and techno-utopian values, where technology is deployed on the basis that it will solve a presumed problem. Our empirical focus is on the application of Proptech to longer-term rental market, which is emerging in less visible ways than its highly contested counterparts in the short-term rental sector.