I’ll talking about Digital Real Estate and The Geopolitics of Real Estate at AAG this year!

The Geopolitics of Real Estate

If you like academic blood sports, come along to my Author meets the critics: The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights

Friday, 4/7/2017, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM; Harvard, Marriott, Third Floor
Organizer and Chair: Jason Dittmer – University College London
Panelist(s):
Desiree Fields – University of Sheffield
Alan Wiig – University of Massachusetts
Manuel B. Aalbers – KULeuven
Nicole Cook – The University of Melbourne
Dallas Rogers – The University of Sydney

Digital Real Estate

Desiree Fields and I will also be talking about the Key Issues In Digital Real Estate: Cohorts, Platforms, Data, Labour
This is part of the sessions on: Real Estate Technologies: Genealogies, Frontiers, & Critiques I
Friday, 4/7/2017 at 10:00 AM.

Abstract:
Already underway for several years, the digitally driven reconfiguration of the real estate industry is accelerating: business increasingly relies on new forms of data and processing techniques to create value. With critical geographic research on smart cities and automated urban governance proliferating, the digital also infuses current geographic inquiry and knowledge production. Despite the prominence of the digital in today’s real estate industry and real estate’s central role of in reproducing late capitalist social relations, real estate has not been a major focus of this agenda. This paper scopes key issues in digital real estate, drawing on case studies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and Asia. We first consider digital platforms, from phone and tablet apps to global data analytics and mobile cloud computing. Second, we outline ‘user cohorts’ including private sales and rental agents; residential and commercial property managers; individual and commercial investors; and holiday and rental tenants. Third, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way people advertise, buy, sell, rent, manage and think about real estate in the digital era. Fourth, we examine how notions of ‘scale’ relate to digital real estate, including geographical scales (e.g., local/global and physical/virtual); institutional scales (e.g., small to large companies); and data scales (e.g., small/ big, data as volume). The paper interrogates questions about digital real estate data as a commodity, the role of digital real estate technologies in housing (in)equity, and how digital disruption of labor will change the way we buy, sell and manage real estate.