Platform real estate: theory and practice of new urban real estate markets

Recent years have witnessed a surge in the development of digital real estate technologies. Often referred to as PropTech (property technology), these innovations might variously promise more efficient portfolio management (e.g. VTS), new ways to rent accommodation (e.g. Airbnb), or hassle-free maintenance (e.g. FixFlo). Whilst commentators have debated their novelty as either highly disruptive or a temporary fad, few researchers have sought to fully theorize the digital real estate platform. And those that have provided overviews of the so-called PropTech landscape have failed to do so in a sufficiently critical manner, instead opting for a raft of essentialist and categorical terms. Borrowing the lenses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and platform studies, this paper develops a theory of digital real estate platforms to address this conceptual gap. And through a qualitative analysis of some 400 businesses, it provides a series of key observations of Platform Real Estate as an improved theoretical neologism to inform future research. These observations are important to better understand the nature of digital real estate platforms and the manner in which they may reconstruct future urban real estate markets – a subject of great concern to researchers and market participants alike