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作者

Joe Shaw

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue8,P.1037-1064

语言

英文

关键字

Real estate,urban geography,platforms,digital technology,market sociology

作者单位

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford , Oxford, UK

摘要

Recent years have witnessed a surge in the development of digital real estate technologies. Often referred to as PropTech (property technology), these innovations might variously promise more efficient portfolio management (e.g. VTS), new ways to rent accommodation (e.g. Airbnb), or hassle-free maintenance (e.g. FixFlo). Whilst commentators have debated their novelty as either highly disruptive or a temporary fad, few researchers have sought to fully theorize the digital real estate platform. And those that have provided overviews of the so-called PropTech landscape have failed to do so in a sufficiently critical manner, instead opting for a raft of essentialist and categorical terms. Borrowing the lenses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and platform studies, this paper develops a theory of digital real estate platforms to address this conceptual gap. And through a qualitative analysis of some 400 businesses, it provides a series of key observations of Platform Real Estate as an improved theoretical neologism to inform future research. These observations are important to better understand the nature of digital real estate platforms and the manner in which they may reconstruct future urban real estate markets – a subject of great concern to researchers and market participants alike. KEYWORDS: Real estateurban geographyplatformsdigital technologymarket sociology Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Sarah Knuth, Dillon Mahmudi and Will Payne for their editorial support in publishing this paper; as well as for organising the Real Estate Technologies sessions at AAG 2017. In addition, the author is very grateful for the helpful comments and input from three anonymous reviewers and editor Susan Moore; as well as earlier feedback from Danny Dorling, Andrew Dwyer, Mark Graham, Ewa Jasiewicz, David Moats and Pip Thornton. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.