Already underway for several years, the digitally driven reconfiguration of the real
estate industry is accelerating: business increasingly relies on new forms of
data and processing techniques to create value. With critical geographic
research on smart cities and automated urban governance proliferating, the
digital also infuses current geographic inquiry and knowledge production.
Despite the prominence of the digital in today’s real estate industry and
real estate’s central role in reproducing late capitalist social relations,
real estate has not been a major focus of this agenda. This paper scopes key
issues in digital real estate, drawing on case studies from the United
Kingdom, North America, Australia and Asia. We first consider ‘platforms and
infrastructures’, from phone and tablet apps to global data analytics and
mobile cloud computing. Second, we outline how ‘people and labour’ are
implicated in digital real estate, including the role of private sales and
rental agents; residential property managers; individual investors; and
holiday and rental tenants. Third, we consider how ‘digital commodification’
and ‘digital capital circulation’ are changing the way people advertise, buy,
sell, rent, manage and think about real estate in the digital era. Fourth, we
examine ‘orders and borders’, and how notions of ‘scale’ relate to digital
real estate, including geographical scales (e.g., local/global and
physical/virtual); institutional scales (e.g., small to large companies); and
data scales (e.g., small/ big, data as volume). The paper interrogates
questions about digital real estate data as a commodity, the role of digital
real estate technologies in housing (in)equity, and how digital disruption of
labour will change the way we buy, sell and manage real estate
Foreign Real Estate Investments: Agents, Networks and Strategies
