Platform landlords: Renters, personal data and new digital footholds of urban control

Abstract

Under digital capitalism, the interests of landed property and digital platforms are converging. This article explores this dynamic in rental homes operated by corporate landlords by querying how private equity, pension funds and other institutional investors mobilise renters’ personal data to extract value from their assets. This article argues that as corporate landlords embrace the logics of rentier platforms, data offers a new frontier of accumulation. ‘Double threat’ enclosure describes how the traditional material enclosure of real property and extraction of monetary rents combines with the digital enclosure of renter subjects and extraction of data rents to drive returns on rental investments. To make this argument, I dissect the corporate landlord as a rentier platform. This dissection foregrounds its digital infrastructures, data as the lifeblood of platforms, and datafication as the process of mobilising data to capture data rents. Build to rent (multifamily) provides a compelling case study as a growing global asset class. I show how corporate landlords compile sophisticated renter profiles, convert renter data into ‘operational metrics’, and leverage recursive feedback to drive operational efficiencies in asset management. Double threat enclosure effectively revises tenant/landlords relations in its attempts to: (1) transform renters into techno-economic objects (assets) increasingly legible only in these terms; (2) score, sort and stratify renters based on asset management imperatives of operational efficiency; (3) monitor, discipline and monetise renters with unprecedented intensity; and (4) exclude and invisibilise those who are unviable techno-economic objects. Double threat enclosure, with its new digital tools and sites (ie. renters; tech stacks) of accumulation, augments the financialization of housing and exacerbates risks to renters. The ramping up of private control over (data about) city residents/renters, expands concerns to include the way rental homes risks becoming a foothold for exercising power, not just extracting rents.