Evolving Market Infrastructures: The Case of Assetization in UK Social Housing

Researchers with an interest in real estate financialization have recently turned their attention to the rental sector (Wijburg et al. 2018; Byrne 2020). While earlier work highlighted the growth of buy-to-let (BTL) markets in the UK and Netherlands (French and Leyshon 2009; Aalbers et al. 2017), for example, scholars have begun to focus on the growth of institutional landlords (Revington and August 2020), the build-to-rent (BTR) market (Brill and Durrant 2020; Nethercote 2020) and REITs (Waldron 2018), as intermediaries deepen the reach of financial capital into residential markets. The carefully curated ‘departure’ of the state from housing provision (Belotti 2022) has seen local authorities either transfer or sell their housing stock, with private landlords standing-by to capture the resultant rent extraction opportunities (Wijburg and Aalbers 2017). Studies have emphasised the light regulation and subsequent poor management by private landlords (Brill and Durrant 2021), but in contrast, housing associations (HAs), are more strictly regulated and have a social mission as part of their charitable foundations, which historically underpins attempts to prioritise tenants (Byrne and Norris 2019; Cooper 2022).