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.
Introduction
The value(s) of housing is currently a key topic of intellectual discussion, with debates around financial value of real estate (Christophers, 2023), venture capital flowing into Proptech (Dal Maso et al., 2021), the social values of housing as home (Blunt and Dowling, 2022; Madden and Marcuse, 2016), rising property values (Aalbers, 2016; Adkins et al., 2020), value capture in infrastructure development (Kroen and De Gruyter, 2021; Stein, 2017) or the value of housing for social reproduction (Reid-Musson et al., 2020; Winders and Smith, 2019). These debates cut across moral and political philosophy and draw in disciplinary solitudes as varied as feminist care ethics and urban political economy (Power and Mee, 2020). With these debates in mind, we focus this article on the different ways that Proptech (i.e., digital real estate technologies) are mobilised across regimes of value (Appadurai, 1986). That things can have competing values is not a novel idea and indeed, recent work argues for the plurality of value as a means to escape the almost magical quality of value as something that is conjured but which has material consequences (Lake, 2023: 2). Attempts to reconcile or commensurate housing’s values with each other typically involve the use of proxy valuations, whereby, for example, a housing’s sales price becomes its real estate value, or the value of home becomes a site of care or social reproduction, held in tension with the financial valuations of home. Here, we are interested in exploring the tensions and entanglements between competing regimes of value (Rogers and McAuliffe, 2023), acknowledging the almost hegemonic dominance of the capitalist regime.
In this article, then, we explore the politics within and between different claims about housing, real estate, and Proptech values. Doing so, we demonstrate how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to attempt to establish the particular values of housing-as-an-object or technology-as-a-product. We discuss three regimes through the case study of residential rental Proptech in Australia: (i) capitalist, (ii) care and (iii) techno-utopian, respectively centred around discourses of economic, social, and utopian values. Housing, and the technologies and policies used to shape its provision, distribution, and outcomes, is increasingly captured by the capitalist value regime, its market discourse and logics. To illustrate our conceptual case, we move beyond these reductive (typically financial) valuations of housing, and the projected ‘fictitious’ financial values (Marx,1894[1967]) of Proptech companies and technologies, as espoused by Proptech start-ups chasing venture capital; these values dominate discursive frames in public, policy and media debates about both housing and Proptech. Instead, by engaging here with differing value regimes relating to housing, tenants and Proptech, we reveal a more complex, situated and relational politics of housing value (Dal Maso et al., 2021). As such we enter recent debates on value, which highlight its qualitative, context-dependent and contingent properties that invite an understanding of different value regimes (Lake, 2023: 7–8; Massumi, 2018: 4; Rogers and McAuliffe, 2023). Drawing on a desk-based analysis of private rental Proptech interviews with stakeholders in the Australian Proptech landscape and an industry workshop, the latter two of which included entrepreneurs, real estate groups and tech developers, we show how housing, tenancy and Proptech valuations are constructed, and explore how these different valuations intersect to constitute a politics of value (Rogers and McAuliffe, 2023).
While political economy perspectives are central to our work, we also draw on other disciplinary conceptualisations of value – significantly, anthropological approaches exploring how values are attributed to and circulated through things as part of their political and social lives (Appadurai, 1986). Appadurai refers to regimes of value to illustrate that commodity exchange does not necessarily follow or even require a shared cultural frame to establish the value of something, but rather the cultural coherence of the value of something is variably dependent on the situation within which value claims are made, and this can change from commodity to commodity (1986: 15). A regime of value, in this sense, is consistent with both very high and very low sharing of standards by the parties to a particular commodity exchange. Such regimes of value account for the constant transcendence of cultural boundaries by the flow of commodities, where culture is understood as a bounded and localized system of meanings. (Appadurai, 1986: 15).
To outline this case, this article proceeds as follows. First, we contextualise our more-than-political economy approach to understanding the politics of Proptech value by outlining the platformisation of real estate, the Australian private rental sector and political-economy approaches to date. We then present our analysis and discussion of the social lives of residential rental Proptech via the three identified regimes of value through the: capitalist, a digital ethics of care, and techno-utopian. Discussion of these three regimes reveals the processes that are used to make value claims, not just within each value regime, but also between them (Rogers and McAuliffe, 2023); tracing the social lives of Proptech illuminates entanglements across value regimes. The value assigned to Proptech as an artefact is relationally produced and thus changes across these regimes and its encounters with different actors. While some clearly only value Proptech for its economic value, others complicate this with attributing care or utopian value to proptech as well. These competing regimes and the tensions between them reflect Appadurai’s (1998: 57) observation on the ability of objects to “spill beyond” defined spheres of value. We conclude by underscoring the importance of exposing this politics of value for undermining normative material/economic discourses of value that have captured public and policy debate about the meaning of housing and Proptech.
Real estate and proptech in Australia
Proptech (i.e., property technology) is an industry term that encapsulates digital and platform technologies that intermediate and at times automate access to information about property. The intermediation function of Proptech can range from sourcing investment capital for developers and landlords through to finding a place to live for residential tenants. In our study, we focus on proptech that is developed for and deployed within the private residential rental sector in Sydney, Australia. Our focus on the private ‘longer-term’ residential rental sector excludes the ‘short-term’ rental sector and associated tech such as Airbnb. Home ownership has traditionally been prioritised and normalised in Australia; however, a combination of market and regulatory forces, growing inflation and stagnant wage growth has placed home ownership increasingly out of reach. As a result, the rental sector has increased from 27% of households in 1997–1998 to over 30% in 2022 (ABS, 2019, 2021). Proptech is being inserted into the longer-term rental sector through different technological products at different speeds of development and with different effects than those for the short-term rental sector. If the emergence of Proptech for the short-term rental sector, such as Airbnb, is spectacular and highly visible, the emergence of Proptech for the longer-term rental sector has been much more stealthy and less visible by comparison. The development of Proptech for the longer-term rental sector deserves more attention. The empirical material we draw upon is from a three-year research project partnership with three large tenants unions that is investigating the current landscape and potential implications of Proptech for tenants. We have conducted 10 interviews with stakeholders from the real estate sector, the Proptech sector, and tenant advocates, as well as observations of industry events. It is the analysis of this material that underpins the article.
Australia’s private rental system is characterised by “mum and dad” landlords with very few corporate landlords in the landscape, alongside a number of key real estate franchises which manage rental properties. Rental regulations also differ between states and territories. There are therefore some key differences in the Australian Proptech sector and by consequence our observations, compared to work on corporate landlordism and financialisation that dominates the Proptech literature (Christophers, 2023; Fields, 2022). As such the rental landscape is quite fragmented and unsuited to products that rely on transferability across geographies or uniform markets at scale. An exception is the small but growing build-to-rent sector in which developers have larger scope to trial Proptech across their portfolio; however, this remains relatively limited (Nethercote, 2023). Additionally, the regulatory variation across Australia makes it difficult to transfer products from overseas or interstate, as one of interviewees reflected:
… there’s a legal element too which is you know, making sure that we adhere to all the countries rules and regulations around property management and properties itself now Australia is probably the most complicated when it comes to that … And that’s because every state is independent, they all have different legislations different tenancy agreements different notices …. pretty much everything is quite different from State to State.
create multi-sided markets primarily between renters and landlords, but also other actors such as utility suppliers, insurers and concierge services, for example (Fields and Rogers, 2021), with the aim of making renting a smoother, app-mediated process, where digitisation reduces costs for landlords and data enhances transparency for tenants. (Wainwright, 2023: 340)
Taking a slightly different position, Christophers (2020: 179) uses the concept of platform rent to analyse the intermediation function of platform technologies. In this conceptual formulation, platform rents are generated because users are willing to pay the intermediary platform for their service (Airbnb is a classic example). As Christophers (2020: 181) notes, “the core service—or at least the one for which the platform rentiers are principally remunerated … — is indeed intermediation”. What is key here in relation to tenants and rental Proptech is that a piece of proprietary technology is being used to intermediate between tenants and landlords (and their agents), properties and the capitalist real estate market. Tenants’ rental experiences are subject to the extractive effects of both material housing and digital platform rents and assetisation. In looking to develop valuable landed and digital assets, the rental Proptech and private rental sectors are contributing to the commodification and commercialisation of tenants’ rental experiences.
Exploring the social lives of proptech
Building on this work, below we consider and expose the multiple and entangled regimes of value that are enabled by longer-term residential rental Proptech across its landed and digital domains – and sometimes with complex entanglements between different values in the same physical site. As a medium of connection, Proptech does not solely connect with capitalist regimes of value, even when this regime is dominant, as in capitalist societies. For instance, in one example we discuss below, Proptech was intentionally used to develop community intended to bridge the divide between landlords and tenants. Different regimes of value might be attached to such considerations, and likely to differ dependent on the actors involved. Here, Appadurai’s (1986) work on the social lives of things is useful to make sense of the different value regimes and their entanglements; the social life in which a ‘thing finds itself in’ is key to exploring its value to people. Things can be social, as in the circuits of exchange, a gift, something stolen, or something that is commoditised, but in whatever form it takes these things accrue value through their association with other things and connections (Maalsen, 2019: 3). The construction of value is itself political and by “focusing on things or objects being mobilised, rather than the function of exchange itself, we can reveal more about these social lives and their political consequences” (Maalsen, 2019: 3). Thus, rather than solely focusing on the exchange or intermediation functions of proptech, we focus here on the different ways that proptech is being mobilised – by real estate agents, and Proptech developers – to reveal the social lives of Proptech across three regimes of value.
Economic value: Capitalist regime
Geographical work on Proptech has critically analysed its extractive nature. The practices of the highly financialised and assetised housing sector have been accelerated via digital technologies, amplifying the speed at, and sites from, which value can be extracted. Economic value and profit are often positioned as dominant values to be circulated through and enabled by Proptech by the makers of Proptech products. Market regimes of land and housing value dominate in capitalist societies, including in Australia. As Bhandar (2018: 54) notes, since Petty and Locke, “what constituted the proper use of land, by proper subjects” in English common law has been “based on a particular cultural and economic ideal of how to live as a rational, productive economic actor”. Therefore, capitalist regimes of landed property are a “key method of valuing land and people” (Bhandar, 2018: 51).
Our empirical data adds to the work on capitalist regimes of land and housing by showing how rental Proptech further entraps housing with capitalist land and real estate markets, and therein shapes the value claims that are made about rental housing. The rental Proptech sector has enabled opportunities for value extraction that extend across the value of the material properties (e.g., houses); platform rents, intellectual property rents, and venture capital into the platforms (e.g., technologies); and in the commodity value of the data these technologies gather, consolidate and sell. Because in this context, Proptech is embedded in a regime of economic value, it is applied in way that reflects what is socially-constructed as valued in this regime – namely the pursuit of capital extraction. To follow Appadurai (1986; see also Massumi, 2018 and Lake, 2023), value is context dependent and contingent. The context here is a dominant capitalist regime of real estate value as a value-laden process that is being reconstituted through the development and deployment of proptech.
Much like more traditional market-based real estate regimes, the digital market-based regime of Proptech is organised around forms of structural, political and discursive power that makes it hard to value or re-value housing with respect to alternative regimes. Multiple points of transaction, exchange and value creation are fabricated across the rental cycle with Proptech. Elsewhere, we have described this as a whole of life Proptech rental cycle typology to show how rental tech enables, for example, investment in rental accommodation via fractional investment platform logics, or the creation of valuable ‘data’ through the tenant application process, the collection and management of bonds, property management, utility connection, end of lease and even through eviction and moving (Maalsen et al., 2021). In this sense, Proptech does not just enhance existing financial instruments but rather creates new areas for capital production and extraction. As Wainwright (2023: 340) observes, Moving home generates new transactions, data, fees and rents, with apps designed to facilitate and encourage circulation, whether moving city, trading-up or down, or finding new housemates. It can be argued that to meet the demands of venture capital, RPPs seek to attract more potential tenants by smoothing the process of rental circulation. In other words, the physical circulation of tenants and their data through space is central to the circulation of capital for accumulation.
In our fieldwork, we heard about rent rolls being created, digitised and sold by real estate agencies, Proptech providers, and property developer-landlords across various scales of physical housing assets holdings and different modalities of value capture. On one hand, there is value being created in relation to the physical, material aspects of the rental property (i.e., the houses). The key incomes that are being generated – and are well-known – are the property rents that move from the tenant to the landlord, and the leasing agent’s fee that is extracted from this transaction. However, the digitisation of rent rolls produces another form of value in the artefact itself, and data they collect, collate, list, buy and sell. Therefore, it is not just the property that is circulating in an economic regime of value, but the rent roll itself has become assetised. The Proptech sector is helping to digitise rent rolls, making data on rental income, property details, tenant rental histories, bond deposit and so on, much more mobile, transferable, interoperable, and commodifiable. As one property manager reported to us,
With the delivery of … these new technology platforms, our expectation will be that we can probably stop using [manual rent roll management] as a metric and we can start to look at the system managing the properties and a property manager is somebody that manages relationships and exceptions to the system. So that we expect to change the economics of a property management business and return profitability and hopefully grow the asset value of rent rolls.
… another trend I’ve noticed just from the private sector is … the consolidation of rent rolls, just for how much disruption there was to the rental market at the onset of COVID-19 with people having difficulty coming to an agreement with landlords, people falling behind on their rents and a lot of those property management services were just dissolved because the cost for managing all of these investment properties was becoming too much. So, these businesses would sell their rent rolls to other agencies. So major real estate agencies [are] looking after a lot more rental properties.
Social value: Digital care ethics
Digital care ethics is an embodied and relational (i.e., social) value schema that acts as a counterbalance to some of the more extractive, capitalist forms of rental Proptech. Care, while widely understood, can manifest in many different ways and which may exist in tension with other values – through politics, ethics, affective engagements and as labour and maintenance (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). For Tronto and Fisher, an ethic of care involves attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (in Tronto, 1993: 127–134). For others, care is a politics that aims to incorporate care “within all institutions and aspects of production and consumption and engage with the totality of environmental and social justice issues” (Gottleib, 2022: 5). It is a form of solidarity and interdependence; and necessitates relationships across different institutions and sectors (Gottleib, 202: 4–5). Care exists in contradiction to and is undervalued by capital, and a care-centred regime – one that attributes value to acts of care – would require a paradigm shift that prioritises care for humans and all life (Fraser, 2016; Gottleib, 2022: 43; Tronto, 2012). But care should not be accepted unproblematically. The giving and receiving of care can cause harm, and it is not always practiced with benevolence (Power et al., 2022; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).
Following this, we position a digital care ethics as an embodied and relational (i.e., social) value schema, that acts as a counterbalance to some of the more extractive, capitalist forms of rental Proptech. In this sense, we are identifying a more hopeful politics of Proptech (see Maalsen, 2023a; McElroy and Vergerio, 2022). Indeed, the distinction between markets and care is not impermeable as we might think, as Smith (2005: 13) argued in her work on the creation of care-full spaces by homeowners. While care and care giving are performed through entanglements of people and things in the case of Proptech, it is the combination of people and technology that enables this production of value. Extending care to the earth and the environment as advocated by care scholars means extending care to and through digital technologies. We can relate to this as a form of algorithmic care (Maalsen, 2023a) which encompasses the beneficial affordances of technology but also which also allows room for critique of power, inclusion, and exclusion that are entangled in these algorithmically enabled practices of care through a “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 205).
Indeed, unlike the examples of tenancy advocacy technologies we opened this section with, our empirical data reflects this more complicated engagement with care – the entanglements of value in Proptech are not neatly divided between for-profit economic extraction and other more socially-oriented values. Care intersects with Proptech in interesting and conflicting ways. While we might think that care is not part of the developers’ modus operandi, we see glimpses of its acknowledgement, while also placing it in a subordinate position to economic returns. For tenant unions and advocates, technology and platforms are seen as mechanisms in which to enable provision of care. We work through these examples in what follows.
Relationships are central to the production of value oriented around an ethics of care of Proptech. One real estate management software company we interviewed talked about care driving their approach to community.
We are helping our clients, who is the agent, to better connect with their community, which is landlords and tenants. Because if they are all better connected, they will all thrive. I put a bit of a mental health angle on that, that the anxiety and tension that can come from people in distress can be life-changing and it can be serious, so how do we make those sorts of things more interactive?
I challenge our product design and development people to think about, ‘how do I make this easier for people in this ecosystem to connect?’ So, for a tenant it might be being more easily [able] to lodge a request for a repair, better able to track when the repair is going to be done and when they’re going to turn up onsite. Better ways of knowing how much I’ve paid and whether my rent is in arrears. Better reminders, easier banking. All of the sort of things that might make my interaction smoother
Care intersects with Proptech in other ways too. In this next example, we show how care is undervalued compared to the pursuit of profit, despite the provision of care being a key component of rental property management. That care is undervalued in the property sector is not surprising. As feminists have long argued, care and care work are often feminized and underpaid (Tronto, 1998: 16). One of the most care intensive roles in the property sector is property management. This is typically the least well numerated role in the real estate profession, performed by younger employees and is often an emotionally stressful job managing tenant and landlord conflict, as one of the interviewees noted,
they’re not paid as much as a sales agent. They’re often younger. They’re dealing with often heavy workloads in terms of the number of properties they’re dealing with they are the main point of contact when people are having a lot of trouble with their homes. So it’s quite stressful often having to deal with those problems.
… one of the one of the things with proptech, you’ll notice that everyone’s trying to get closer to the deal, and they’re trying to get closer to the money. And the challenge with property management is that it’s hard to get close to the money in the same way that you get close to the money when you’re when you’re doing a sale.
… a property manager as a job is a very hard job … You are very much at the coal face in dealing with both the tenant and the landlord and often that relationship can be pretty fractious. It’s a very long term relationship in many cases. It’s quite different to if you’re selling a house and you’re dealing with an agent, selling your house. You’re only dealing with them two or three months maximum. So - and again there’s a lot of money involved. So the agent is going to make sure that they get that money and all the rest. But with the property management manager, they’re not paid as much as a sales agent. They’re often younger. They’re dealing with often heavy workloads in terms of the number of properties they’re dealing with … I guess they’re the - they are the main point of contact when people are having a lot of trouble with their homes. So it’s quite stressful often having to deal with those problems. Often tenants can get very stressed.
I think - you’re going to be really unimpressed with this list and it’s really short. Look, email arrived in the world I think in 1994 and so that’s been something that we’ve been able to improve upon. And these trust accounting programs send SMS messages and emails from the system which is nice. In terms of the consumer that’s really it. Like the reporting hasn’t improved … The technology additions have been things like owner portals which vastly were unsuccessful. Email and SMS in terms of getting information to clients or consumers faster. But that’s as far as it goes. There’s no kind of chat integration or social integration or - there’s nothing beyond SMS, which came second to email.
Utopian value: The techno-utopian values of the proptech and real estate sectors
The final regime of value circulating in Proptech is that of techno-utopianism. By this we refer to an uncritical acceptance of digital solutions as better than non-digital solutions, and wherein technology is deployed to address some presumed social, rental and/or business problem, often with very little evidence to support the claim that it is, in fact, a problem at all, or that the proposed ‘solution’ will indeed redress it. Often this appears in discourse as “disruption” and which is frequently used in tandem with “innovation” and framed within technological determinism (Geiger, 2020: 170–171). As Jeffcote (2003: 1) notes, technological utopianism “uncritically equates technology with progress” and is “a rather naïve form of technological determinism” (2003: 1). Such techno-utopianism is the quintessential Silicon Valley ethos, “where an individualistic anti-authoritarianism combines with a ‘profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies’ (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996: 45; Geiger, 2020: 171). In this regime, value is attributed to the utopian ideal of technology but as has become evident throughout the previous two sections, this value does not operate independent of other regimes. In the example we use to illustrate techno-utopian approaches below, there is an overflow into both economic regimes and to some extent, care.
For Geiger (2020: 180), the danger of tech utopian regimes of value manifest in three ways. First, that the tech-utopian narrative disproportionately occupies news and public discourse; second that venture capital is routinely attracted to startups with rapid growth and public attention, rather than more mundane but potentially more useful options; and third, that tech disruption is inevitable. This disruption and innovation as techno-utopia emerges in Proptech in different ways. Proptech is often presented as an apolitical intervention and one, which despite its need for extraction, promises a better outcome for tenants, agents and landlords. Underpinning these is a confluence of economic, care and utopian regimes – the idea that Proptech can solve problems via the collection, automation and analysis of data to create a seamless, more profitable, yet supposedly equitable future.
Often these tech-utopias use the alternative rhetoric of a housing hack (Maalsen, 2023b, 2022) but one in which there is no real problem to work around in the first place but is done so in a way that plays into broader housing concerns. For example, a link between housing affordability and suboptimal use of housing assets have been circulating in broader debates about the housing affordability crisis as well as sustainability. This was even evident at institutional levels when the former Govenor of the Reserve Bank of Australia suggested that to cope with rate rises people needed to find flatmates to make money off their empty rooms (McHugh, 2023). While Lowe received critique for this suggestion, the linking of space optimisation, affordability and disruption had been already circulating in the Proptech sector (and indeed underpins much of the broader sharing economy logic).
To the Proptech sector, this is another area of value generation – both economic but also a belief in the value of technology and entrepreneurial mentality to solve all our ills. In one of our interviews, the digital lead of a property development company projects the start-up entrepreneurial mentality of extracting value from “underutilised” spaces, framed as a mechanism of affordability – one being held back by planning and regulatory constraints:
If people can create income off their own property that they own or rent rather than being restricted, then, you know, that helps out with affordability. If your own investment property can then be revenue generating, then that helps with affordability. … Being able to have greater flexibility for time-of-day use [and] using residential properties as commercial spaces. Why can’t I - when I’m out of my apartment during the day – why can’t it be used as daycare centre? It’s sitting empty … Or why can’t the building’s amenity space be used as a daycare centre when nobody’s there …? We’re just not maximising the potential and abilities of our properties.
The danger of tech utopia is, as Geiger (2020: 179) observes, in the legitimation of value creation as a political technology, regardless of whether the vision eventuates or not. And it is in the dazzle of disruption that often less dazzling options are overlooked. Many of the challenges associated with the rental sector are related to broader structural inequalities exacerbated through the asset economy and the housing crisis. The proposed intervention to maximise potential and abilities of properties leans to the spectacular: the suggestion will likely garner more attention than a mundane but workable solution to affordability and in markets where affordability is an intractable issue, such disruptive ideas take on the air of inevitability that Geiger (2020) refers to – if we have not managed to address these issues by others means, then surely technology and entrepreneurialism can fix it for us? Here Proptech’s value is both produced by and reinforces narrative of tech utopias – the idea that technology will save us. However, technology that optimises underutilised space at home will have little effect on these broader structural challenges – indeed as Airbnb has illustrated, such applications can further entrench housing inequality.
The illustrative example above highlights this spillage between the different regimes of value that we assert. The proposed value of maximising the potential and abilities of properties, exists across both utopian logics in the belief that this is a desirable, helpful (care-full) and disruptive solution, and economic regimes in its imagined future value generation. While they are linked, it is an issue of emphasis. By focusing on a moment of techno-solutionism, the regime of value the idea is circulating in is techno-utopian – it underlines a belief in the value of technology to disrupt and help, and in doing so entangles itself with care-oriented outcomes. It is also, however, situated in an economic regime of value in its intention to maximise value extraction.
Conclusion
The role of Proptech in extracting and accumulating economic capital is well documented; economic value – extracted from both material and digital assets – maintains its dominance in Proptech logics. Yet, amid the property, data, and technology itself, lies a more nuanced, and conflicting, plurality of value regimes. Our particular contribution in this article is bringing visibility to Proptech’s application to the longer-term rental sector, drawing from both political economic and anthropologically derived understandings of value, to illuminate how the social lives of Proptech circulate situated discussions of Proptech more firmly in value plurality, demonstrating how three different regimes are variously entangled or exist in tension.
For example, we saw that Proptech is mobilised to generate economic capital in more than one way – mobilising value in the rental property; the value in the technology; and finally the value in the data collected by Proptech. But stakeholders with a dominant interest in economic value also sometimes became entangled with social capital. For example, one significant software company expressed a desire to create systems and processes, which improved the experience for all stakeholders in the rental ecosystem. The application of tech in these circumstances co-exists and competes with economic value regimes. Finally, we saw proptech mobilised in pursuit of techno-utopianism, a value that itself tries to accommodate, yet ultimately ends in conflict with, both economic and social values, primarily through a belief that technology could solve problems within the rental sector while still generating profit. In pursuing this value, both the structural and systemic changes necessary to address key challenges, as well as smaller practical applications were overlooked. Where technology could generate better outcomes was in the often-mundane applications – the sharing of information between tenants and advocates, SMS and email for property managers – rather than the spectacular disrupters that Geiger (2020) identifies and critiques.
Proptech’s growing influence across the longer-term rental sector is therefore not a simple story of extraction and economic value; while this is a major value regime, the landscape is variegated. Better insights into the calculative dimensions of these conflicting value regimes are important as Proptech’s application to the longer-term rental sector grows.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Rupa Ganguli for the information on rent rolls.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financialsupport for the research, authorship, and/or publicationof this article: This research was funded by the Australian Research Council grant LP190100619.
