Beds for rent

Abstract

Housing has long been the quintessential rentier asset. But under financialized capitalism its enrolment into accumulation dynamics has greatly intensified. As investors increasingly turn to residential real estate in search of corporate rents, the logic of assetization is reaching novel locations in the housing process – extending to new scales, metrics and micro-morphologies. This paper argues one such novel location is that most intimate and familiar of places: the bed. Bringing together constructivist and political economy approaches to assets and drawing on the empirical case of co-living, the bed is identified as both a technical tool for projecting and enhancing income from real estate, and a strategy for de-risking investments by hyper-focusing on the necessities of life. Reducing domestic space to a technology for bare repose, bed-as-asset offers key insights into how the rhythms of housing are being harmonized with the needs of investors.

Keywords:

• beds
• assetization
• financialization
• rent
• co-living
• housing

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Kampmann, Sam Friedman, David Madden and the editors of this special issue for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Residential Contradictions conference in August 2022 for their encouragement when I initially presented the idea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical approval statement

Prior to starting the research, this project was granted ethical approval by the LSE Research Ethics Committee, reference no. 000902.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council scholarship [reference no. 2098616].

Notes on contributors

Tim White

Tim White is a PhD candidate in Cities at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He researches housing, inequality and political economy, with a particular focus on financialization, digital transformations and shrinking domestic space.