Bringing new ideas to housing research

The growth of private renting is a distinctive feature of 21st-century housing systems. In some countries, this has been driven by corporate landlords in the direction of rentier capitalism, escalating the affordability crisis. In Australia, these institutional landlords have less purchase. Theoretically, this could buy time to invent a more sustainable rental model; in practice, corporate capital may be establishing a different bridgehead for similar shifts in the housing economy.  To explore this, we track changes in the proportion of housing held by individual absentee proprietary owners. We find their share is growing, mainly through an increase in properties intermittently generating rental returns. This coincides with the expanding role of PropTech start-ups – intermediaries financializing the frontier of secondary property ownership. Australian housing may thus be less at the lagging edge of a shift to institutional ownership, and more at the cutting edge of a further round of ‘profits before people’.