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.