Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654

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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

The post-politicization of rental housing financialization: News media, elite

storytelling and Australia’s new build to rent market
Megan Nethercote
Centre for Urban Research RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, 3001, Australia

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This article explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent
Australia housing (BTR) in Australia which helped depoliticize this new wave of rental housing financialization. It argues
Build to rent that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of
Financialization of rental housing
financialized capitalism through which this consensus is ‘policed’. Specifically, reporting scripted the rise of
Multifamily housing
Politics
institutional investors into Australia’s rental sector in ways that disavowed properly political disagreements vis-
Rancière à-vis BTR. Its analysis is informed by post-political theories, which converge around a shared concern with how
Media political disagreement is disavowed and replaced with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of
certain orders of subjects. Post-foundational thinker Jacques Rancière’s thinking on aesthetic regimes assists in
exploring this consensus and its limits by foregrounding how regimes of representation delineate what can be
said and argued (and different agents’ authority to speak). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news
media restricts the coordinates of public debate through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to
understand and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class whose expansion is a matter of national economic in­
terest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR’s dual function as
an asset class and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR
thinkable in this way. The aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public BTR debate represents a post-
political strategy that assists in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia, albeit
with limits.

1. Introduction The financialization of rental housing represents a major frontier for

Geographic scholarship on the power of elite storytelling has been
energized by a fascination with how stories have helped sustain and
rehabilitate financialized capitalism (Engelen, 2015; Engelen et al.,
2011). This work also recognizes that these stories are not magically
‘auto-legitimizing’ (Seabrooke, 2006: 40), notwithstanding the power of
economic and political elites (Swyngedouw, 2011) but rather gain
credibility and persuade, including by tapping into the ‘public sentiment’
or the ‘mood of the times’ (Engelen, 2015; Stanley, 2014). Stories told
about housing, in particular, have long taken advantage of the politics of
mass financialization, leveraging homeownership ideologies and the
‘constituencies of financialization’ (Crouch, 2009), comprising investor
subjects who see themselves as personally responsible for their future
welfare (Nethercote, 2019). But the financialization of rental housing
requires different stories that must surely leverage different political
dynamics, albeit relatively little is known of these important stories.
capital accumulation. Broadly, financialization concerns ‘the increasing
dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and
narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of
economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households’
(Aalbers, 2019: 544). Financialization, in the case of rental housing, has
taken diverse forms, from the ‘financialized privatization’ of public and
non-profit rental housing (Wijburg & Aalbers, 2017a, 2017b) to the spec­
ulative repossession of rent-stabilized tenements (Fields, 2015, 2017; Ter­
esa, 2016), single-family homes (Beswick et al., 2016; Byrne, 2020; Byrne,
2020; Fields, 2015, 2018; Fields & Uffer, 2016; Fields et al., 2016; Gar­
cia-Lamarca 2020; Immergluck & Law, 2014a, 2014b), and multifamily
apartments (e.g. Canada: August & Walks, 2018; August, 2020). Alongside
these speculative strategies, so-called ‘rental housing financialization 2.0’
involves relatively less risky, rent-backed accumulation strategies (Wijburg,
Aalbers, & Heeg, 2018). Build to rent (BTR) typifies this latter strategy (see
Nethercote, 2020; London: Brill & Durrant, 2021; London & Amsterdam:

E-mail address: megan.nethercote@rmit.edu.au.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102654
Received 14 May 2021; Received in revised form 2 February 2022; Accepted 8 April 2022
Available online 24 May 2022
0962-6298/© 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
M. Nethercote
Brill & Özogul, 2021). BTR involves institutional landlords such as pension
funds, private equity firms, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts
(REITs)1 and publicly listed real estate firms who develop purpose-built
rental accommodation for retention under single ownership and opera­
tion as rent-generating assets (Nethercote, 2020). Investors then leverage
these BTR assets through new financial instruments, either by going public
as real estate investment trusts (REITs), by issuing securitization, or both.
As this frontier advances, this article queries the stories told by
financial elites about the financialization of rental housing. It centres on
the nascent Australian BTR market, which has none of the maturity or
scale of North America’s multifamily sector nor does it rival the explosive
growth of new UK or Irish BTR markets (Nethercote, 2020). And yet,
appetite for Australian BTR investment is growing, with year-on-year
market expansion since 2017 (CBRE, 2021a), several tenanted
market-rate developments and some 40 BTR projects underway, to a total
of some 15,000 units, across Melbourne, Sydney, the Gold Coast and
Brisbane (CBRE, 2021a).2 This article explores local news media and
financial media reporting over the four years to 2020, as this new housing
tenure rose from near-obscurity to understand how expanding media
coverage (digitally) represented and conceptualised this new Australian
BTR market to public audiences. Its analysis examines dominant media
representations of BTR, the underlying assumptions and terms of refer­
ence that delineate what can be said and argued about BTR, and BTR
stakeholders’ capacity to speak in these forums. The media is understood
as an age-old, vital and evolving medium for the storytelling that unites
elite coalitions (for overview: Ward, 2009, pp. 233–4; Logan & Molotch,
1987; Stone, 1989) and storytelling as a form of narrative sense-making is
understood as a discursive technology of elite power, wherein stories are
‘the glue that holds elite coalitions together temporarily’ (Engelen, 2015,
p. 1608; Engelen et al., 2011, pp. 12–32).
This analysis is informed by post-political theory, particularly Jac­
ques Rancière’s (1999) ideas on aesthetic regimes (sense-making) and
their interpretations (e.g. Dikeç, 2012a, 2012b), which I specify below.
It explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the
emergence of build to rent housing in Australia which helped depoliti­
cize this latest wave of rental housing financialization. In particular, it
investigates the practices, forms of visibility and conceptualisations
involved in BTR media reporting, guided by Dikeç’s (2013: 29–30)
heuristic for Rancièrian aesthetics, and it considers who constructs such
representations, taking inspiration from Blakey (2021). Following Dikeç
(2013: 37), this approach requires a ‘questioning of the sensible evidences
put in place within such a [aesthetic] regime’: a questioning of what is
legitimised (made to make sense) and delegitimised in the formation of
common sense, wherein common sense refers to shared meaning and to
‘a faculty of judgement’.3 Rancièrian thinking is also sensitive to what
and who lie beyond prevailing frames of reference, namely the (de)
emphasised, ‘unheard’ and strategically ‘ignored’ (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 674;
also; McGoey, 2012a). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that
news media, like any device that interferes with what we see and do not
see, restricts the coordinates of public debate surrounding Australian
BTR, including through: (1) technical storylines that guide public au­
diences to understand, interpret and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset
1
Real estate investment trusts are professionally managed, listed investment
vehicles which allow investors to invest in large scale real estate assets, much as
they might in the share markets, but benefiting from regular rental income and
capital growth.
2
For context (also Nethercote, 2020), the mature US multifamily sector is
worth an estimated US$3.3 trillion, and includes some 14.5 million units across
62 largest metro markets (CBRE, 2021b, p. 4), while newer markets across the
Atlantic, such as the UK involves year-on-year growth with some 42,400 units
in operation (the equivalent of 1.4% of the PRS) and a further 50,000 units in
the pipeline (JLL, 2021, p. 7).
3
Dikeç’s (2013: 31) reads Rancière’s ‘sensible evidences’ as a play on words
that invokes what is evident (‘a quality of obviousness’) and is evidence (‘a
quality of providing a ground for judgement).
2
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
class with expansion a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic
silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding
BTR’s dual function as an asset and as housing; and (3) endorsement of
BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in
this way. This aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public
debate about BTR represents a post-political strategy that may assist in
non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia
through this latest wave of rent-extraction, albeit with limits as the
conclusion elaborates. I argue that (digital) news media—an age-old
medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology
of financialized capitalism through which a consensus is ‘policed’, as
reporting scripts and legitimises the rise of institutional investors into
Australia’s rental sector in ways that disavow properly political dis­
agreements vis-à-vis BTR.
This argument is mounted as follows. First, I situate Rancièrian
thinking in post-political theory, as essential background for under­
standing public sense-making surrounding BTR or, in Rancièrian terms,
the aesthetic regimes or the police distribution of the sensible. I then revisit
storytelling surrounding the financialization of (rental) housing, as
technologies of elite power within aesthetic regimes. Second, I consider
contemporary media ecologies where such stories are told, underscoring
how vested interest within and beyond the media encourage stories to be
told in particular ways. These media insights are key since I will argue
Australian news media outlets promulgated storylines about BTR that
served the interests of BTR industry actors, including by circumscribing
how BTR was characterized in reporting and the terms of references
audiences were guided to use to evaluate BTR market expansion and
government performance in response to this. Guided by Dikeç’s (2013)
Rancièrian heuristics, remaining sections: detail the media’s hand in
making BTR available to the senses, as column inches dense with BTR
industry exploits, research and spokespeople positioned BTR on the
public radar; identify how BTR was made sensible through a dominant
representation of BTR as an asset class rather than housing tenure; and
show how this way of relating to BTR was made to seem sensible through
technical economic storylines that cast BTR expansion as a matter of
national economic interest.4 Within these narrow coordinates of debate,
the legitimacy (and indeed desirability) of market expansion was pre­
sented as a given while, in the main, competing perspectives were
neglected if not discounted as myriad complexities and inconsistencies
surrounding local BTR expansion and its implications for Australian
households, neighbourhoods and cities were strategically ignored. The
analysis identifies a chorus of (prospective) BTR developers, investors,
operators and real estate service companies (RESCs) who assume au­
thority as credible BTR ‘experts’ to make BTR thinkable in this way.
Overall, these representations and conceptualisations of BTR, as per­
formances of technocratic consensus, reflect the elite hegemony that
characterizes post-political tendencies. Traditional news media emerges
complicit, as reporting serves to regulate which perspectives gained
currency and which languished or become inadmissible. Depoliticizing
BTR by restricting the coordinates of public debate on rental housing
financialization in this way risks circumscribing public understandings
of this new wave of urban rent-extraction and crowding out informed
public debate based on expanded frames of reference. These are
important insights for understanding how the financialization of hous­
ing is being realised and reproduced.
This Rancièrian aesthetic reading of BTR elite storytelling enhances
understandings of the financialization of rental housing for geographical
research, shedding needed light on Australia’s under-examined BTR
4
In investment management, an asset class refers to: “a grouping of in­
vestments that exhibit similar characteristics and are subject to the same laws
and regulations. Asset classes are thus made up of instruments that often behave
similarly to one another in the marketplace.” (investopedia.com/terms/a/
assetclasses.asp). Note too that an asset differs from a commodity, with the
former yielding a (future) income stream.
M. Nethercote
market emergence and local industry actors. It contributes to un­
derstandings of how institutional investors and other BTR industry ac­
tors, such as developers navigate the diversity of local/national settings
in which they look to operate (see Brill & Özogul, 2021), including by
establishing local news media as a key platform for the strategic depo­
liticization of their activities as these actors look to secure and expand
into new markets.5 Identifying the media as a digitised discursive device
in this way likewise provides another empirical case that corroborates
the diverse ways financialization is being enabled through the digital (see
Ash et al., 2018). In terms of theoretical contribution, the Rancièrian
aesthetic analysis of this empirical case of post-political expression
contributes to lively geographical debate on the post-political by
corroborating its theoretical value at a time when aesthetic regimes are
garnering mounting interest, including amongst political geographers
(e.g., Bassett, 2014; Blakey, 2021; Dixon, 2009; Tolia-Kelly, 2019;
Ghertner, 2010; Grayson, 2017), but where distorted iterations risk
undermining these analytics perceived purchase for our field (Dikeç,
2017; Swyngedouw, 2017).
2. Rancièrian aesthetics and elite storytelling
Post-political theories converge around a shared concern about the
disavowal of political disagreement and its replacement with techno­
cratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of
subjects (Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014: 4). This depoliticization is
variously theorised as ‘post-politics’, ‘post-democracy’ and ‘post-­
political’ (Crouch, 2020; Dikeç, 2005; Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999;
Swyngedouw, 2011; Wilson 2014),6 with post-political thinkers sharing
a post-foundational ontology (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, p. 10).7
5
This research corroborates MacLeod’s (2011: 2636) point, when he writes:
‘The geographical unfolding of these interscalar relations means that all agents,
even globally oriented firms, once ‘fixed’ or located in a particular territory,
encounter non-substitutable spatial relations and become locally dependent
upon certain services and conditions of reproduction, particularly in relation to
different territorial levels of the state (city, region, nation).’
6
Davidson and Iveson (2015: 543) describe how political theorists express
concern with the contemporary fate of politics, especially the ‘political choices
… constrained by the constant invocation of necessity [whereby] face[d] with
externalized threats … urgent action is required, not democratic decision-
making’—dynamics that hark back to the Thatcherian rise of TINA-thinking
[there is no alternative]. This depoliticization broadly speaking involves ‘a
situation in which the political – understood as a space of contestation and
agonistic engagement – is increasingly colonised by politics – understood as
technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures that operate within an
unquestioned framework of representative democracy, free market economics,
and cosmopolitan liberalism’ (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, p. 6). A
post-political mode of governing colonises if not sutures political space, such
that political disagreement is disavowed and repressed (Wilson & Swyngedouw,
2014, pp. 3–4). Notably, while the post-political condition is typically charac­
terized by the increased hollowing out of the institutions of liberal democracy,
as their ‘vital energy’ seeps out into privileged circles of economic and political
elites, the post political is however never a ‘realised totality’ (Marchart, 2007,
p. 161): ‘the political’ is never fully foreclosed (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2017).
7
Post-foundational ontologies recognise a key distinction between politics
and the political —so-termed ‘political difference’—whereby ‘mere politics’
concerns strategy and conventions for the contest of power, while the political
concerns the ontological basis for organising society (Marchart, 2007). Key
thinkers—Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière—conceptualise post-politics, democracy
and the political in different ways, yet similarly posit that there is ‘no absolute
foundation’ or ultimate ontological basis for ordering society. Accordingly, any
manner of ordering society, through the imposition or consolidation of spatial
and temporal arrangements, is contingent and out of this contingency arises
opportunities for disruption and antagonisms of and within the perceived nat­
ural order, namely: politics (Dikeç, 2017; Marchart, 2007). Politics is therefore
about dissensus, disagreement and antagonism; it is not about debate or
competition towards consensus.
3
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
Post-politicization, as a form of depoliticization, does not entail the
‘withering away of politics’ but rather the ‘transformation of politics in
ways that attempt to suspend the political’ (Swyngedouw, 2017, p. 56).
A post political analysis foregrounds this suspension of the political or
‘suturing process’ (Swyngedouw, 2015, p. 180). The analysis takes this
forward by reflecting upon news media and BTR reporting as possible
post political ecosystems and practices that are intended to ‘suture social
conflict through consensual, negotiated, and technocratic’ narrations of
BTR (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw 2010: 1579) and which help maintain
post political modes of governing (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, p. 5).8
This article approaches news media as part of an aesthetic regime
mobilised around the latest wave of housing financialization: BTR. Key
dissensual thinker Jacques Rancière (2009, 2013) conceptualised
aesthetic regimes as involving distinct framings of visibility and intel­
ligibility or a so-termed distribution (or partition) of the sensible (‘le
partage du sensible’) that delineates what is (made) available to the
senses (Dikeç, 2013). For Rancière, orders of governance—termed ‘the
police’—sustain these ‘regimes of sensibility’ by delineating ‘what is
visible, sayable, audible, thinkable, etc., what makes sense and what
does not’ (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 673). Rancière (1999: 29) specifies: ‘an order
of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible
and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and
another as noise’. As this makes clear, a key concern for Rancière (1999:
xii, italics added) lies with ‘what can be argued, the presence or absence
of a common object, the very capacity of the interlocutors to present it …
‘.9 Aesthetics then is not art, beauty or even just a sensory experience;
rather such regimes are filters through which things are represented,
conceptualised and rationalised. Connecting aesthetics and the police,
Blakey (2020: 3) interprets the police order as having a ‘corresponding
aesthetic configuration which normalises certain ways of seeing,
sensing, feeling, acting, speaking and being in the world’. Politics,
meanwhile, ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it,
[and] around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’
(Rancière, 2013, p. 13). Politics is the preserve of disagreements and
disruption within this police order that involves a break or deviation—a
re-distribution of the sensible—that transforms that police order (Dikeç,
2012a, 2012b). Rancièrian aesthetic analysis thus centres systems and
practices that shape our recognition or aesthetics of knowledge
(Rancière, 2001: 11) and, since aesthetics regimes involve new ar­
rangements or associations of oftentimes familiar ideas, they are akin to
the crafting and staging of narrative fictions.
Rancièrian analysis has not been a mainstay of housing financiali­
zation research by any stretch, but aesthetic regimes are ‘ubiquitous’
albeit under-theorised within geography (Straughan, 2016, p. 15) and
storytelling is far from unchartered territory, with scholarship on
‘story-driven capitalism’ (Engelen et al., 2011, p. 21; Froud et al., 2012)
elucidating narration as a device of elite power. As geographic research
sought to excavate the mechanisms behind post 2007/8 global financial
crisis resilience, researchers turned their attention to the ‘interpretive
battles’ (Stanley, 2014, p. 896) or ‘causal stories’ (Blyth, 2002, p. 39)
8
Some may baulk at what they view as an unpalatable tension in this inte­
gration of a political economy framework for understanding rental housing
financialization, and (Rancierian readings of media) sense-making. Those
readers may be partially assuaged by commentary that suggests the benefits of
this integration (e.g. Crouch, 2020; Froud et al., 2012), demonstrates empiri­
cally the value of their integration (e.g. Engelen et al., 2011), and elaborates
possible theoretical workarounds (e.g. Buscher-Ulbrich, 2020).
9
Despite its name, Rancière’s ‘police’ is ‘not a shorthand for domination in
general or for total domination (i.e. totalitarianism)’ (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 673) nor
‘about the “disciplining” of bodies [but rather] a rule governing their appear­
ing’ (Rancière, 1999: 29), but rather ‘something akin to a hegemonic process
that serves to assign social roles and positions, acting as an implicit social law
that configures what can be done, said and made possible’ (Davidson and
Iveson, 2015: 547), and, in this way, ‘institutionalised and legitimised forms of
domination’ (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 673).
M. Nethercote
involved in a crucial (re)telling of events. Engelen and colleagues’
(2011: 14; 20; also see Abolafia, 2020) analysis of Ben Bernanke’s
pre-crisis ‘story’ of financial innovation and the Great Moderation, for
instance, identifies that these stories were ‘detached and imprecise’ in
character. Such stories, they suggested, detail: ‘not just vernacular
economics but also TS Eliot’s “mess of imprecision of feeling” [… actors
were …] hubristically vague …. without ever engaging with the specifics
of what was going on in the markets … neither [..] was empirically
based’ (20). Sustained tropes bolstered their perceived trustworthiness;
Engelen (2011: 20–21) argued: ‘Any doubts about whether the future
would be like the present were allayed by the repetition of a stock ac­
count in standardised language across a range of sources with no sig­
nificant dissent’. Froud et al. (2012: 43; 56–57) likewise suggest that
‘repetitive liturgical incantation—turns out to be continually impor­
tant’, describing ‘liturgies or familiar, often repeated forms of words that
reassure’. Stories, this suggests, are not ‘frivolous assets or cyclical
ideologies’, but rather, as Engelen and colleagues underscore, ‘literary
assets which acquire exchange value under certain conditions’ (20–21).
Elites not only use stories to justify past events but also to define the
future. Sociological literature on financial performativity, and on the
performative nature of public statements specifically, shows how sto­
rytelling constructs an image or narrative to bolster elite interests
(Aalbers & Engelen, 2015; Abolafia, 2010, 2020; Clarke, 2012; Froud
et al., 2012; Velthuis, 2015)—indeed, intuitively, such ‘stories always
carry traces of positional interests’ (Engelen, 2015, p. 1620). In the case
of housing financialization, stories provided ‘blueprints for a post-crisis
settlement’ (Stanley, 2014, p. 896). The power of storytelling is brought
to life in Engelen’s (2015) account of Dutch financial actors who used
storytelling to escape deepening regulation on securitization practices
by crafting narratives that helped differentiate Dutch securitization
practices from ‘risky’ US practices, including framing Dutch practices as
in the public interest. For instance, Engelen (2015: 1620) describes how
an emphasis on ‘funding gaps’ helped cast Dutch banks as victims rather
than ‘perpetrators’, and thereby ‘transformed what was half-truths at
best into quasi-religious doxa’. As these storylines shored up legitimacy
and political support, the state deployed regulatory powers to open up
opportunities for financial markets. As Engelen (2015: 1608) specifies,
these were ‘coordinated attempts to construct new narratives … to tap
into new sources of legitimacy’. Aalbers and Engelen (2015: 1600)
likewise corroborate the power of public commentary in their editorial
on securitization. Focusing on regulators’ attempts to manage its ‘bad
reputation … through cosmetic exercises’, they show how then governor
of the Bank of England, Mike Carney, used The Financial Times including
through Op-Eds, ‘to present the latest thinking among the main actors in
the global monetary diplomacy game’ and to broadcast ‘his carefully
constructed image of a regulatory “superstar” who speaks truth to
banking power’.
In unpicking aesthetic regimes, the untold, undisclosed and ignored
can be just as telling as the main plot line. Engelen et al. (2011: 21; also
Engelen, 2015) underscore the ‘discrepancy between the reassuring
disclosed and the dangerous undisclosed’ laid bare by the financial crisis
as Bernanke’s story of financial innovations was fully discredited. A
growing literature on strategic ignorance and agnotology excavates this
deliberate production of ignorance and its strategic applications (see
Taussig, 1999; Proctor, 2006; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Slater, 2021,
pp. 1–29), some directly engaging with Rancièrian thinking, based on
evident synergies between issues of knowledge and regimes of repre­
sentation and sense-making. Taking this forward requires attending to
strategic silences in the media-driven aesthetic regime surrounding
Australia’s new BTR market, heeding McGoey’s (2012a: 571; 2012b)
advice ‘to resist the customary assumption that knowledge is more
powerful than ignorances, or that social actors have an obvious interest
in expanding knowledge and eradicating ignorance’.
While the financialization of housing literature captures something
of economic elites’ role in narrating financialized dynamics, we lack
parallel accounts and understandings of the stories told about rental
4
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
housing financialization. Brill and Durrant’s (2020) (2021: 9) study of
BTR in London identifies elite actors’ ‘narratives of negativity’, sug­
gesting industry actors leveraged the housing crisis by strategically
enrolling public anxieties surrounding the private rental sector and
rogue buy-to-let landlords. Narrations first voiced in ‘commercial in­
formation or reporting’, Brill & Durrant, 2020 note, then became
embedded in policy discourse, with two government commissioned re­
ports positioning institutional investors and their investments in rental
stock as key to urban housing futures both as a remedy for PRS problems
and ‘supply constraints’. Such findings underscore the potential signif­
icance of representational strategies in BTR’s expanding markets but
also the need for better understandings of the aesthetic regime or police
distribution of the sensible that delineates what is visible and intelligible
or sayable and thinkable, about these contemporary dynamics.
Before pressing forward, note that a Rancièrian approach un­
derstands the distribution of the sensible as policed not only in ways that
limit what is sayable, but also in ways that limit who has authority to
speak. Cited research suggests legitimacy is secured in part by tapping
into the ‘mood of the time’ or ‘public sentiment’ (Engelen, 2015; Stan­
ley, 2014) which for some time has been the politics of mass financial­
ization.10 Bringing a Rancièrian reading to bear on questions of
(discursive) authority, Brigstocke et al. (2021: 1361) approach authority
‘as a relation that generates shared grounds for experience, judgement
and “ideas of objectivity”‘. Authority, by this reading, is not about
reason or the force of law, but rather a demand for ‘recognition of the
authority figure’s expertise, wisdom or skill; [and whereby] when
recognition is no longer granted, the authority relation immediately
collapses’ (1360).
3. (Digital) news media, financialization and elite storytelling
Mass media is one arena where politics are inscribed or thwarted
with the media both medium and agent in elite storytelling. This article
proceeds on that basis, approaching the media as significant to the
aesthetic regime that surrounds the financialization of rental housing. In
the first instance, contemporary news media provides a vital medium/
platform for communicating elite stories including on matters of finance
(Aalbers & Engelen, 2015; Engelen, 2015; Froud et al., 2012; Velthuis,
2015). As the values of finance have penetrated everyday life (Langley,
2008; Pellandini-Simányi, 2020), news reporting has responded to
increased public interest in financial news and finance practices, such as
trading (Clark et al., 2004, pp. 291–294; Schifferes & Coulter, 2012).
This has spawned ‘finance as entertainment’ that some judge as ‘ow[ing]
10
Engelen (2015) writes about how storylines deployed by the Dutch financial
elites to rehabilitate the local market for securitised mortgages included nar­
ratives that ‘clearly hint at a political base that is the effect of
mass-financialization through debt-financed home ownership … [using their
narratives to] posture as victims and effectively whitewash their contribution in
blowing up a phenomenal Dutch housing bubble’ (Aalbers & Engelen, 2015, p.
1603). Engelen describes the subsequent pairing of ‘discursive politics’ or
‘highbrow jargon’, with more ‘populist “stories” and romances”’ or ‘lowbrow
homilies’, such as ‘“you can’t live above your means” or “debts need to be paid
off”. Relatedly, Aalbers and Engelen (2015: 1604) write, that: ‘ … the political
economy of securitization is to a very large extent coequal with the politics of
mass financialization. No better way to keep politicians and regulators away
from cleaning up the Ponzi scheme that is mass-financialization through
debt-driven real estate appreciation than by seducing as many citizens as
possible to join the scheme.’ These dynamics in turn fuels a politics in which
stricter market or bank regulation becomes near impossible to enact, thereby
helping perpetuate the vulnerabilities of mass financialization (Aalbers &
Engelen, 2015, p. 1602; Mian & Sufi, 2015; O’Callaghan et al., 2014). Accounts
such as these go some way in addressing Seabrooke’s (2006) criticism of
constructivist efforts as slipping into murky waters by implying that elite nar­
ratives simply gain legitimacy as if by magic, through their dismissal of public
audiences or suggestion such audiences are ideologically malleable.
M. Nethercote
more to MTV’ and boosted the circulation of dedicated finance news­
papers (Clark et al., 2004, pp. 297–8). Soaring advertising spends on
financial products, for mortgages and other lines of credit for instance,
has meanwhile fuelled audiences’ appetite for more financial reporting
(Clark et al., 2004; Schifferes & Coulter, 2012). All the while, this
reporting does something: as ‘fantasy documents’ they operate ‘as sym­
bols of expertise and competence … they persuade, they assuage, they
insulate’ (Clarke, 1999: 135), helping to ‘convince viewers [readers]
that someone or something is in charge—and that ultimately all is well’
(Clark et al., 2004, p. 298).
Contemporary media ecologies are also increasingly financialized
(Happer, 2017; Mills, 2020; Winseck, 2011), entrenched within the
political economic framework and integral to the corporate and political
establishment (Mercille, 2014; Australia: Murray & Frijters, 2017). In
dedicated financial reporting, media and industry intermingle profes­
sionally, with some noting a ‘revolving door’ between financial elites
and media figureheads whereby ‘crossing the aisle’ from journalism into
the financial sector is not uncommon (Schechter, 2009, p. 19). This in
turn reproduces the perspectives of political and business elites, in a far
cry from the media’s supposed ‘watchdog’ function of yesteryear,
though note that early urban political economy research concerned with
city politics long implicated local media in urban growth agendas.
Writing on the New Urban Politics (NUP), Logan & Molotch, 1987:
70–71) described local newspapers as motivated by ‘growth per se’ and
‘involved in representational politics, mediating [a growth] alliance’s
strategies in such a way as to mobilize a support consensus’ (Ward,
2009, p. 234). Still, news production and its politics have evolved almost
unrecognisably since the 1980s, with more diverse, digitised and global
coverage and access. But while this inflects its representation of urban
politics (Ward, 2009), the local scale remains important as Kevin Cox
urged decades ago when noting that notwithstanding globalisation ‘this
relational dialectical around fixity and mobility and its expression as a
“local dependence” ought to be at the heart of urban political analysis’
(MacLeod, 2011, p. 2636).
Meanwhile, as growing appetites for engaging and accessible finan­
cial reporting meet with demand for in-depth coverage to satisfy in­
dustry professionals, stories of corporate activities and related ‘dramas’
have risen to the fore (Tambini, 2010). These, moreover, are stories most
likely to be furnished by vested interests through increasingly sophisti­
cated PR agents, therein generating media reliance (Davis, 2000;
Australia: Murray & Frijters, 2017). Jacobs (2015) corroborates this in
the Australian housing arena, showing how property lobbyists rely on
the media to disseminate information, apply pressure, and advocate or
oppose proposed legislation, using proactive PR departments to feed
corporate news and information to local media outlets. Bringing a post
political perspective to bear on contemporary media ecologies, Dean’s
(2009: 21–24) ‘communicative capitalism’ suggests how the kinds of
dynamics behind news media might contribute to the disavowal of the
political, including the way ‘the intense circulation of content … oc­
cludes the antagonisms necessary for politics, multiplying antagonisms
into myriad minor issues and events’.
Yet the media, as a set of powerful privately-owned institutions, does
not simply fall prey to sophisticated lobbyists; rather, multiple factors
shape why it tells stories in particular ways and not others. A rich subset
of Irish geographic research underscores the media’s own vested in­
terests and subsequent biases, heeding Schudson’s (2002) call to
recognise the media as a political institution with a constitutive role in
political life. Mercille’s (2014) analysis of how the Irish media helped
sustain the housing ‘bubble’ prior to 2007 and defended the neoliberal
consensus thereafter, identifies three drivers for news organisations’
biases. These include: their multiple links with the corporate and
5
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
political establishment, which explain their shared interests and per­
spectives; their reliance on advertising revenue and subsequent pres­
sures to accommodate advertisers and especially real estate actors who
pay handsomely to advertise in their property sections; and third, their
dependence on ‘experts’ within elite institutions. O’Callaghan et al.’s
(2014) account of media portrayals of ‘ghost estates’ in the aftermath of
the GFC corroborates how newspapers’ conservative positioning arises
from concentrated ownership amongst large commercial media groups,
the corporate and governance ties between newspapers and the appa­
ratus of Ireland’s political economy, and journalists’ imperatives to stay
‘friendly’ with sources and gatekeepers. They also note the increased
reliance on press releases to drive content, resulting in part from casu­
alisation of the sector and its disinvestment in investigative reporting,
and the leading role of the private sector in authoring those documents.
Parallels are evident with the Australian context, where Murdoch’s
News Corp Australia and rival Nine Entertainment, who own the news
media I analysed, have ties to the property industry that extend well
beyond their advertorialised property sections. Their digital property
portals, realestate.com.au (Australia’s largest real-estate marketing
business, owned by News Corp Australia) and Domain (Australia’s sec­
ond largest real-estate marketing business, majority owned by Nine)
confirm the entanglement of media and property industries, with News
Corp CEO Thompson cited saying as much: ‘News Corp is not just a news
company, we are a digital real estate company and a global information
company’ (Mason, 2016: np. italics added).
4. Examining build to rent in the media
A Rancierian aesthetic approach helps explore how the nascent wave
of rental housing financialization has been made ‘common sense’ in
Australia. As noted, Rancière terms the (police) distribution of the sensible
the ‘taken-for-granted configuration of perception and meaning … the
conditions in which arguments can be made, recognized as such, and
engaged’ (Ruez, 2013, p. 1129). This prompts a question, which Dikeç
(2013: 31) formulates as follows: ‘what kinds of practices, forms of
visibility and conceptualisation are involved?’ Answering this requires
consideration of disagreements, where two ways of making sense of the
world are present (ie. Dissensus, Dikeç, 2012b, p. 274) and reflection on
what is (de)emphasised or excluded. In seeking such answers, the
analysis below mobilises Dikeç’s (2013: 29–30; also 2012a; 2012b)
tripartite heuristic which foregrounds practices (what is made available
to the senses in terms of the boundaries of the ‘visible’ or ‘sayable’);
visibility (how it is made available to the senses and, following Blakley
[2021: 4] a questioning of by whom); and conceptualisation­
s/problematisation (how it is made to make sense, namely the ‘estab­
lished, habitual, inherited, or “common sense” forms and modes of
perceiving and relating to the world’) (Dikeç, 2012b, p. 264).
My analysis homes in on local news media as key public discursive
renderings of BTR, including to understand how disagreement, or lack
thereof, features in this forum. The digital archives of non-tabloid
newspapers were searched using the term ‘build to rent’, as the stan­
dard Australian referent, within a four-year period between January
2017 and January 2021 capturing all coverage of BTR from its earliest
mentions. This search yielded natively digital content (content produced
for online consumption) and analogue articles digitised for archiving
and later consumption. The analysis focuses on articles published in four
newspapers: two national, two state-based. The Australian (plus Saturday
edition Weekend Australian) and The Australian Financial Review (AFR)
were selected as Australia’s only daily national print newspapers
alongside the most widely read mastheads: The Age, a Victorian-based
newspaper with circulation into adjacent states, and the Sydney
M. Nethercote Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654

Morning Herald (SMH), its NSW-based ‘sister’ paper. The location of BTR definitions, subtypes and hybrids; asset class risk/viability; and to a
these latter two papers in the two states where 75% of Australia’s BTR lesser extent the benefits of BTR housing. This exploration was supple­
activity is concentrated further justified these choices. mented by a grey literature review, focused principally on relevant
These newspapers occupy positions variously described as politically Australia-related BTR industry reports, many heavily cited in this
centrist, centre-right or right-wing, with The Age perhaps most vocal dataset. Below, I document illustrative media representations and
about its increasing politicization, including pressure to rehearse argumentation surrounding the emergence of Australia’s BTR market,
particular angles and move more towards the right (Meade, 2020). This noting that while storylines evolved over time, their assumptions and
selection of newspapers reflects Australia’s unhealthy media ecosystem, main warrants endured. The discussion is structured in three parts: the
as one of the most highly concentrated media ownership landscapes in first addresses practices (ie. what is made available to the senses) and
the world, where concerns over media diversity, independence and visibility (how it is made available to the senses and by whom) and the
reliability are currently the subject of a senate inquiry.11 These tradi­ second concerns how BTR is made to make sense and delineates pre­
tional news sources also require further justification, given vast and vailing conceptualisations of BTR, homing in on the police distribution of
evolving news consumption choices. A tabloid/traditional broadsheet the sensible around Australian BTR as a requisite step in understanding
newspaper divide remains, despite news digitalisation and broadsheet ‘the object’ in any attempted BTR politics. The third section highlights
tabloidization (resizing), with value-laden associations, including of how alternative ways of seeing BTR were de-emphasised or ignored to
classed readerships. This dataset also excludes video and audio content argue that BTR news media assisted in circumscribing the frames of
as well as news consumed through ‘non-news’ digital outlets and fo­ reference for debate surrounding the rise of BTR in Australia, notwith­
rums, including personalised social media, such as Twitter and blogs. standing the intermittent tabling of counter-perspective and minor
With time and cost constraints surrounding access to television and contestations in reporting, thereby depoliticizing this phenomenon.
radio archival content and non-news digital media unreliably archived,
practicalities have limited their inclusion. Still, some 75% of Australians 5. Representing BTR as an asset class: practices and visibility
over the age of 14 still access these and other traditional newspapers
each week in print or online (Roy Morgan, 2019) and these sources Prior to 2017, BTR was barely on the public radar in Australia. It then
remain influential since television and radio news tends to ‘follow’ hit the headlines, with optimistic pronouncements that BTR’s ‘time has
newspaper coverage (McCombs & Valenzuela, 2020: Ch. 1). come’. These headlines were tempered with caution and some scepti­
A digital newspaper archival search of ProQuest Australia and New cism about the sector’s local viability, at least initially. Investors were
Zealand Newsstream yielded 685 articles with the lion’s share of being discouraged, reporting told, by high land taxes, the inability to
coverage found in the national newspapers: The Australian (211), the defer GST costs on construction materials, favourable tax settings for
Weekend Australian (30), and the AFR (344), trailed by the state papers: speculative property investment and homeownership, withholding tax
SMH (61) and The Age (39) (see Table 1). After reviewing a random set at company rates for non-resident investors and policy uncertainty
sample of 70 articles (approx. 10%) to establish preliminary themes to (Milligan et al., 2015; Pawson et al., 2019; Pawson & Milligan, 2013).
guide coding, articles were read chronologically, coded including by Yet as Table 1 documents, from 2017 BTR gained increasing media
applying tags using proprietary database software (Notion), and ana­ exposure, suggesting its rising local salience. This reporting involved
lysed using an iterative process. Coding topics included: central focus, near-exclusive representation of BTR as an asset class until mid-2019 and
housing problems, BTR attributes and stated value-added, enablers and remained its dominant representation thereafter. Put differently, BTR
barriers to market expansion, actors mentioned or cited, projects and was predominantly represented as one particular type of object, a
locations, evidence-base, and tone. Of these 685 articles, BTR was a financial asset class, as it was made available to the senses through this
central topic in over 60%, and a secondary or peripheral topic or passing mainstream media. Meanwhile, less than a quarter of all reporting
mention in the remainder. represented BTR as a new housing tenure first and foremost. Many ar­
An analogue qualitative analysis allowed for sensitivity to narrative ticles did make brief and vague claims about BTR’s housing-related
context and storyline development over time and including all articles benefits, contrasting BTR with standard private rentals and frequently
improved accuracy over random sampling.12 An initial content/ claiming BTR would provide more professionalised (onsite) manage­
descriptive analysis produced some 80 tags, with each article coded by ment, increased amenity and service, more secure, convenient and
topic, usually with one to three tags, sometimes more to capture content flexible tenancies, and better designed, higher-quality homes. Around
complexity. Many articles reported on BTR actors’ activity or research, two-thirds of articles also cited housing problems BTR would alleviate,
so near one-third of these tags concerned specific BTR stakeholders or such as supply, affordability, tenure security and the lack of housing
their research reports. Analytical coding thereafter identified common ‘choices’. Almost all reporting was supportive or neutral about BTR’s
reporting trends with these indicative of key arguments threaded local emergence with negative or dismissive tones rare.
through the dataset, including: BTR market prospects and expansion The incredible cohesion and homogeneity of BTR reporting appears
rate; local and foreign investor interest; market expansion barriers/
drivers; government/industry endorsements, critiques, and (in)activity;
Table 1
Build to rent in Australian Broadsheet newspaper media (2017–2020).
11
The Australian is owned by News Corp Australia, itself an asset of News Corp Newspaper Cross-platform Build to Rent articles
in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. As such, it often integrates content from weekly readership
2017 2018 2019 2020 Total
(in millions) (Roy
News Corp’s other newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The Times
Morgan, 2019)
(UK). The Australian Financial Review (AFR), The Age and The Sydney Morning
Herald (SMH) are meanwhile all owned by Nine Entertainment Co, Australia’s The Australian 2.4 62 71 59 56 241
biggest media company following a merger between Nine Entertainment and The Australian 1.6 48 84 115 86 344
Fairfax media in 2018, with ownership leading to some content-sharing. Financial
12 Review
Media analysis in geographic research often uses automated keyword
The Age 2.8 7 10 8 14 39
searches, for instance generating ‘word clouds’ to understand frequently used Sydney 4.1 10 11 16 22 61
words and frequently occurring word associations and analysing coded data Morning
through statistical software, including to consider the interactions between two Herald
variables (topics) over time. This is productive and oftentimes mandatory for Total 10.9 127 176 198 178 685
large datasets. For roughly analogous methods see O’Callaghan and colleagues
(2014).

6
M. Nethercote Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654

consistent with Australian news media’s concentrated ownership. This Table 2

narrative consistency also appears to reflect so-called ‘news isomor­ BTR actors in Australian Broadsheet newspaper media (2017–2020): Mentions &
phism’ or ‘inter-institutional news coherence’ (Velthuis, 2015), whereby citations.
journalists’ reporting converges with their peers, including in response Actors Examples of actors mentioned & cited in Build
to pressures within contemporary media ecologies. However, there is to Rent media coverage (*Research reports
little doubt BTR industry actors also powerfully contributed to this cited)

narrative cohesion. Especially vocal were BTR developers, investors and Developers (/Operators) Alter Family; Aqualand; Assemble; Atlis
operators (noting actors’ remit may encompass multiple domains) and Property; AV Jennings; Beck Property Group;
Beller Property Group; Brookfield;
RESCs, many listed in Table 2. Media-active actors included: established
Consolidated Properties; Frasers; Fridcorp;
local developers, such as Australian BTR frontrunner Mirvac alongside Grocon; Gurner; Harry Triguboff; Heitman;
less familiar and smaller actors, local investors such as Qualitas, and JLL (operator); Lend Lease; Meriton; Mirvac;
many established international BTR investors and operators with in­ MSCI; PDG; Pellicano; Power Housing
ternational footprints, global aspirations and new local presence, such as Australia; Stockland; Suleman Group; UBS
Asset Management; Westfield
Sentinel, Greystar and Blackstone.13 Real estate service companies Vertically integrated platforms: Greystar,
(RESCs) were also active, including well-known international heavy­ Sentinel;
weights such as CBRE, Knight Frank, EY and Colliers, many of whom Other: Hmlet; Salta; Scape Student Living
broadcast and circulated in-house research, reinforcing their authority Investors APG; Blackstone; Charter Hall; Coronation
Property; Cromwell; HSBC; Investa; Ivanhoe
to speak as experts on BTR while also amplifying market-supportive
Cambridge; Kanebridge Property Group;
messaging around BTR, as elaborated below. A typical article, such as Macquarie Capital/Group; OMERS; Oxford
The Australian’s ‘EY backs US “build to rent” paradigm’, published on Properties; QIC; Qualitas; Trident Real Estate
July 3rd, 2017, epitomises these actors’ intensive media involvement, Capital; UBS
with extensive citations of an EY report and quotations from the CEO of Vertically integrated platforms: Greystar,
Sentinel;
Mirvac. Other voices included national real estate/property peak bodies
Other: Domus Multifamily REIT; ABTRC
and, later on, Australian superannuation (pension) funds and to a lesser [Australian Build-to-Rent Club with Mirvac &
degree Australia’s ‘Big Four’ banks, who were not involved in BTR CEFC]
financing in these early years, and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Local superannuation (pension) funds: Aware
Super (previously First State Super);
Amongst BTR industry voices, spokespersons (and in some instances
Australian Super; Cbus Property; Rest Super
authors) tended to be senior management, such as CEOs, presidents and State: CEFC (Clean Finance Energy
managing directors and Heads of Residential Property or BTR Research. Corporation)
Some voices were particularly dominant, such as CEO of Australian Professional/Real Estate Service CBRE*; Ernst and Young*; JLL Research;
developer Mirvac, who appeared to preside over BTR debate from the Companies & Consultancies Knight Frank *; KPMG; Savills; PWC*, Urbis
Other: Landcom Research* (NSW Government
outset.
land and property development organisation);
Column inches filled by the local BTR industry’s voices, exploits and Architects Fender Katsalidis; Hayball; Rothe Lowman;
research suggest these actors have wrested some discursive control over Woods Bagot
how BTR was publicly represented and conceptualised. The sheer Peak Bodies & Think Tanks/ Property: Property Council of Australia*;
Policy Institutes Urban Development Institute of Australia
number of BTR industry actors involved and their dominance over other
(UDIA);
stakeholder groups, which Table 2 documents, suggests some consensus Community Housing: NSW Federation of
around these industry actors as legitimate spokespeople for guiding and Housing
gatekeeping BTR debate. Table 2 documents ‘other’ voices too, Policy Institutes: Grattan Institute
including local think tanks, federal and state government, and aca­ State NSW & VIC Treasurers; Prime Minister; State
Planning Ministers; Reserve Bank of Australia
demics, illustrating their relative paucity and inaudibility, most
Academia Curtin University; LSE (report); University of
speaking through the media but a handful of times each at most. Lending New South Wales (UNSW).
support to this interpretation was the relatively limited quoting of state Banks Commonwealth Bank*
and federal government figureheads and their media releases, albeit Other Law firms: Allens*
Online Property Portals: realestate.com.au
with noted spikes around key events or reforms. Also silent, bar rare
(Chief Economist); rent.com.au (CEO)
exceptions, are social welfare lobbyists, such as tenant advocacy groups
and built environment and planning peak bodies and advocacy groups,
who might otherwise have voiced alternative/public interest perspec­ for judgement around local BTR market emergence as the expansion of
tives. A couple of academics are cited, and a single piece of academic an asset class of importance to the Australian economy. As such these
research referenced. BTR tenants, who remain a tiny cohort, are quoted private actors appear central to shaping common-sense about Australia’s
once or twice. Clear then is who can make sense of BTR in these forums: emergent BTR market, with additional work required to confirm if this
the private sector led in characterising BTR as an asset through their puff influence has come about through sophisticated property industry PR,
quotes, commentary and even authorship, and through PR-led reporting media reliance on business media releases and direct quotes for legiti­
on their activities and research. In the context of Australian BTR, the macy, differentiation, and novelty, or both.
‘political aesthetics of authority’ (Brigstocke et al., 2021, p. 1361) in­ Rancièrian analytics understand the delineation of BTR as a partic­
volves practices of broadcasting and circulating industry research, ular kind of object and this particular arrangement of who can speak
among other activities. These actors’ contributions and sway over with authority on BTR as formative in the police distribution of the sen­
reporting meanwhile delineates and reinforces distinct shared grounds sible on Australian BTR. Representing BTR as an asset class first and
foremost, rather than as a new housing tenure, makes Australian BTR
‘thinkable’ in particular ways. Recall the distribution of the sensible is the
13 ‘system of sensible evidences that discloses at once the existence of a
Note that Australia’s urban residential morphology trends highly towards a
suburbanised form, with detached and semi-detached housing the mainstay of common [ie. the whole to be governed] and the partitions that define the
its housing stock, with minority but growing shares of apartments (condos). respective places and parts in it’ (Dikeç, 2009, p. 6). There is no singular
These residential typologies (e.g. condos, and detached housing) involve system of ‘sensible evidences’ (Dikeç, 2013, p. 24), as subsequent sec­
different groups of actors with the condo development set the primary devel­ tions capture, but this dominant partition of the sensible ‘arranges the
opment context for build to rent development.

7
M. Nethercote
perceptive givens’ of emergent BTR in Australia, thereby playing an
essential role, within news media forums at least, in designating ‘what is
in or out, central or peripheral, audible or inaudible, visible or invisible’
(Dikeç, 2009, p. 6). Zooming in on the dominant conceptualisation of
BTR as a financially viable asset class, the next section specifies how
reporting conveys BTR as a distinct type of public agenda item and BTR
industry actors as authorities to set debate coordinates in these ways.
6. Conceptualising BTR as a viable asset class
BTR was made to be seen as sensible through consistent claims about
the under-exploited, national economic benefits of expanding this asset
class and, by 2020, through repeated suggestions such expansion offered
a salve for the pandemic-induced downturn and represented a prime
opportunity for Australia to develop its REITs involving alternative asset
class investments.
Repeated references to industry-calculated return on investment
figures, offered alongside boosterish industry soundbites, operated as a
technology of authority, providing crucial verification for arguments
about the local BTR sector’s improving viability. As I argue, this assisted
the BTR industry to police within narrow terms of reference what futures
were possible for Australian BTR. This specific ‘regime of representa­
tion’ (Dikeç, 2009, p. 6), as underpinning assumptions and authentica­
tion devices, are key to understanding how the media contributed to the
police distribution of the sensible around Australian BTR.
2017 media coverage revolved around BTR project viability, often
conveying the need for government reform to close a ‘viability gap’.
Allusion to technical calculative processes, and industry mandated
4–5% ROIs [returns on investment] especially, impressed a sense of
authority, accuracy and objectivity in claims market expansion was
untenable without government interventions. Draft MIT [managed in­
vestment trust] legislation, which banned managed investment trusts (e.
g., REITs) from investing in housing unless that housing stock was
affordable housing, was widely interpreted as signalling that federal
government interest in BTR extended only to closing this ‘viability gap’
for affordable BTR projects. Reporting intimated federal government
had internalised industry definitions of BTR market feasibility, thereby
further rendering an impression of technocratic consensus about how
sector viability was established, and thus what might later materialise.
In 2018, BTR policy uncertainty and inertia set the tone for report­
ing. BTR proponents out-voiced naysayers, with sceptics advised to take
stock of the UK’s thriving BTR market. Recall that, in the wake of the
2007/8 global financial crisis and as Australia avoided the worst of the
global economic downturn, its capital cities underwent a surge in high-
rise strata apartment development (i.e. condominium), with apartment
approvals tripling from pre-2010 rates in a dramatic transformation of
its highly suburbanised urban morphology (Nethercote, 2019). But there
were indications that the build-to-sell apartment ‘boom’ may have run
its race, and BTR reporting made these known, including: slowdowns in
development approvals and apartment (pre-)sales from stricter APRA
[Australian Prudential Regulation Authority] lending terms,
pre-election anticipation of future withdrawal of individual investor
concessions, (perceived) risk associated with individual foreign invest­
ment, and unenthusiastic public narratives around poor-quality unsafe
high-rise stock, and the BTR sector benefits of falling land prices, falling
office yields, and the growing appeal of ‘lower for longer’ investment
strategies amongst institutional investors. In other markets, such as
London, some suggest BTR might figure as part of a ‘suite of options’
available to the urban development industry (e.g. Robinson & Attuyer,
2021) or as a two-stage process, whereby industry actors use
tried-and-tested PBSA [purpose built student accommodation] devel­
opment to develop their understanding of the local market before
diversifying into BTR, as exemplified by Greystar in Europe and
Amsterdam (Brill & Özogul, 2021). By contrast, Australian reporting
conveyed the growing slump in build-to-sell apartment development as
an important ‘opening’ for BTR. Table 2 corroborates BTR’s positioning
8
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
as a (temporary) ‘pivot’ or diversification, including because BTR de­
velopments are not stalled by finance requirements for pre-sales on build
to sell developments. For instance, Table 2 lists well-established local
build-to-sell developers alongside local investors who are (considering)
diversifying into BTR, including high-net worth families and local
pension funds. By mid-2018, market expansion was increasingly cast as
‘inevitable’ though with its speed, scale and rental submarkets contin­
gent on government reforms. Meanwhile federal-level policy uncer­
tainty endured, for even as threatened changes to MIT legislation (which
impacts REITs) were clarified in September 2018, tax hurdles remained
including BTR developers’ inability to claim Goods and Services Tax
(GST) credits on land and construction costs and foreign investors’
later-confirmed high rates of withholding tax for managed investment
trusts (MITs). Commentary meanwhile praised new state-level endorse­
ments of BTR and planning and tax reforms.14
From mid-2018 and into 2019, reporting changed tack, newly
emphasising snail-pace BTR expansion as a wasted opportunity.
Reporting cast regulatory settings, such as the unfavourable MIT settings
noted above, as ‘blocking’ offshore capital from entering Australia’s BTR
market, and storylines pointed to Australia’s failure to exploit the
‘weight of capital’ eyeing the new sector and suggested Australia was
‘late to the party’ and ‘lagging behind’ US and UK BTR markets.
Reporting confidently pronounced: ‘There’s a much bigger pool of in­
vestment available to this model than is currently being accessed’
(Private development loss is build to rent’s gain: Urbis, AFR, September
10, 2020). This foreign capital was framed as essential to local BTR
expansion, with articles reminding readers that a mere 25% of UK BTR
investments were locally financed (e.g. Home owning retirees will
embrace renting in Australia, AFR, May 6, 2019). Fairly alarmist
reporting also conjured a flood of capital leaving Australia for BTR in­
vestments abroad, with a slew of articles describing the growing in­
vestments of Australian pension funds in US multifamily markets.
In early 2020, amid COVID-19-induced uncertainties, reporting
doubled down on BTR expansion as a salve, pinning national economic
recovery on local BTR expansion, in a sometimes highly exaggerated
fashion. Local developer Mirvac urged that BTR ‘will turbocharge our
recovery’ with federal government interventions (Build-to-rent takes off
in AFL heartland, Weekend Australian, June 20, 2020: 24). Reporting on
an AFR real estate investment banker roundtable—itself concrete evi­
dence of media-property industry ties—positioned real estate as a ‘sur­
prise winner’ of the pandemic as institutional investors looked for safe
and secure yields, including as interest in other commercial real estate
waned. Reporting also continued to hype international BTR heavy­
weights’ growing interest in local opportunities and, increasingly, their
actual investment activities. The scene continued to be set for BTR
market expansion, through repeated references to stalling build-to-sell
apartment sales, as consumer confidence and purchase power tapered.
Reporting meanwhile recalibrated, shifting attention from project
viability to sector scalability and opportunities for Australia to develop
its alternative asset class REITs, which reporting emphasised, remain
underdeveloped relative to other jurisdictions, such as Canada (see
August, 2020).
14
In Victoria, BTR would eventually benefit from fast-track planning appli­
cations, 50% land tax reductions (available from 2022) and exemptions to
foreign investor surcharges on stamp duty and land tax. In New South Wales,
BTR would likewise benefit from 50% land tax reductions, exemptions from
foreign investor surcharges on stamp duty and land tax and permissive BTR
planning controls, including allowances for large projects to be accessed under
the ‘state significant development’ designation, relaxation of design re­
quirements, and non-discretionary development standards which levelled the
playing field with build to sell development.
M. Nethercote
7. The post politics of build to rent
Reporting on BTR as a new housing tenure was limited, by contrast.
Housing-centric representations did broaden somewhat public debate by
conceptualising BTR as an aspirational housing tenure and highlighting
BTR housing’s features and benefits. Yet as this section argues, housing-
centric representations did not fundamentally challenge the sense that
was being made of BTR. Reporting mostly did not acknowledge or dis­
cuss—let alone challenge—the foundational assumption that the
expansion of institutional investors into Australia’s housing system was
legitimate, and indeed desirable. Recall that politics concerns a redis­
tribution of the sensible: it is ‘a polemic on the givens of the police’
(Dikeç, 2012a, p. 673; Blakley, 2021: 4).15 Housing-focused represen­
tations do not challenge the police distribution of the sensible surrounding
Australian BTR. Rather, reporting appears to depoliticize BTR or, more
accurately, post-politicize BTR by suspending the political around this
recent wave of rental housing financialization as this section documents.
7.1. BTR as a housing tenure
Housing-centric BTR reporting discussed BTR’s potential social
benefits, while bypassing possible tensions or contradictions between
BTR’s dual functions as a home and financial asset. This reporting
appealed to the realities and mood of the times, with representations
positioning BTR as an antidote to the beleaguered private rental sector
(PRS), with its high rents, tenure insecurity, and myriad other property
and tenancy management issues. Recall that Australia’s PRS expanded
over the past decade, paralleling growth seen in the UK and the US
though through diverse national drivers (Hulse et al., 2018). Readers
were reminded that the PRS now comprised some quarter of all house­
holds and was nowadays a tenure destination, with homeownership
delayed, unattainable, or ‘traded off’ for locational amenity and flexi­
bility (Pawson et al., 2017). Early media coverage implicitly applauded
BTR’s transformative prospects for rental housing in articles lauding
BTR’s promise, for instance championing BTR as housing ‘you can call
home’. Reporting repeatedly intimated BTR was a PRS ‘disruptor’ that
could revolutionise renting, with suggestions that BTR ‘just might
change the way people view renting’ (Building for renters set to change
views, AFR, November 12, 2019). Developer Mirvac advised readers
that: ‘Australians won’t need much persuading’ since they were ‘crying
out for secure rental accommodation’ (Mirvac flags virus concern as net
profit slips, The Australian, February 6, 2020). Coverage of the opening
of one of Australia’s first tenanted BTR developments, a Mirvac project,
15
Politics is about disruptions to ‘our ordinary way of perceiving and making
sense of the world’, a ‘disruption of established ways of seeing, being, and sense
making—a reorganisation of the partition of the sensible’ (Dikeç, 2012b, p.
270; 274). As Dikeç (2012b: 274) writes: “A dissensus is not a conflict of in­
terests, opinions or values, it is a division put in the “common sense”: a dispute
about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given
[…] putting two worlds in one and the same world”. This dissensus calls into
question the police distribution of the sensible and provides opportunities to
reconfigure the limits of the frame of perception that currently make BTR
intelligible. Rancierian thinking, recall, is premised on the very contingency of
any given police order. Moreover, a Rancierian conception of politics is addi­
tionally ‘accompanied by a commitment to an understanding of equality as
axiomatic; that is, equality of anyone with anyone that has to be taken as a
supposition and constantly verified by opening up scenes of demonstration and
enunciation’ (Dikeç, 2012: 673). Rancière’s (1999: ix) key concern then is with,
as Blakey (2021: 4) articulates: ‘the equality of individuals to make claims in
these dissensual acts of politics. Equality, therefore, cannot be realised in any
given police order, consensus or way of counting, it is instead demonstrated and
verified through the very act of politics’. As Dikeç (2017) specifies, herein lies a
key attraction of Rancierian thinking: ‘an insistence on the opening up of pol­
itics: expanding, rather than confining, spaces of politics, making it possible for
anyone to become a political subject and anything a political issue’.
9
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
contained bold claims and promises: ‘You can stay there for the rest of
your life if you want to … It’s a model where you don’t move into a place
that feels like someone’s investment property … You can hang pictures,
bring your pets’ (An innovative approach SMH, August, 2020). From
2020, more boosterish reporting appeared to double down on differen­
tiations between BTR and standard PRS properties, with industry
spokespeople embracing more of the ‘narratives of negativity’ that their
London’s BTR counterparts deployed (Brill & Durrant, 2020). This
perhaps reflects BTR actors’ rising confidence in the local market after
state government support was announced, but it is strategic too given
these actors’ growing stakes in the local market as they committed to
projects and their vested interest in marketing BTR homes to prospective
tenants.
Other reporting represented BTR as a solution to evolving consumer
preferences, in indulgent reasoning that favoured BTR actors’ vested
interests. Some articles alluded to an equalising of renting and home­
ownership such as reporting on EY research that positioned renting as
financially advantageous over homeownership if renters borrowed to
invest in shares instead (Buyers often better off renting, AFR, April 16,
2019). Articles chronicled BTR as a ‘bells and whistles’ rental product
worthy of its premium rents and regaled readers with anecdotal ac­
counts of US multifamily in global cities, such as NYC, with its bespoke
finishes, flashy facilities, services, and ‘extras’, such as ‘community’.
One article summed up: ‘Fancy an apartment with a rock-climbing wall,
a personal shopper, butler or perhaps a bowling alley and pet-grooming
services?’ BTR would provide, in the words of Greystar, a ‘quality of
rental experience … not on offer here in Australia today’ (Greystar’s
record $1.3b raising for build-to-rent, AFR, February 11, 2021). Mean­
while local developer Gurner claimed BTR provided an ‘aspirational
luxury lifestyle to a much wider range of people’ (Rich Lister’s $1b bet
on ‘luxury’ build-to-rent, AFR, December 3, 2020). Other reporting
appeared to sidestep the evident tension between BTR’s rental premiums
and the local housing affordability crisis, positioning BTR as ideal for
cohorts of ‘renters by choice’ and ‘willing renters’. Meanwhile, reporting
increasingly distanced BTR from ‘precedents’ such as Co-Living and
purpose-built student housing (PBSA) including in response to negative
public associations and publicity surrounding the rise of co-living
‘boarding houses’ in NSW and in an apparent attempt to disassociate
the sector in the early days from affordable or social housing as actors
focused on private-market BTR.
7.2. Strategic oversights in BTR media
How was BTR debate restricted to limited coordinates? As explained,
Rancière (1999 p. xii) is especially concerned with what can and cannot
be argued, and with the order of governance that institutes particular
‘regimes of sensibility’ that set limits on the visible, sayable and think­
able (Dikeç, 2012, p. 673). For this reason, Rancierian thinking instructs
us to pay attention to disagreements/dissensus, wherein two ways of
making sense of the world are present. This final section specifies re­
strictions placed around the coordinates of Australian news media
reporting on BTR by considering: (1) what reporting de-emphasised and
moreover, (2) how reporting ignored or actively disavowed alternate
ways of interpreting market expansion. Considering these briefly below,
I argue the absence of wide-ranging discussion about the legitimacy and
implications of rental housing financialization in these news forums
points to the complicity of Australian news media in an ‘annulment of
dissensus’ around BTR expansion.
Media reporting understated, in the first instance, myriad in­
consistencies, tensions and contradictions surrounding BTR market
expansion, downplaying or limiting coverage of these through superfi­
cial or blinkered reporting. Reporting positioning BTR as a salve to
various housing crises, whether rising rents and tenure security or
housing demand caused by labour mobility, for instance, seldom
explained this dynamic, at best alluding to contested ‘filtering down’
processes, for instance, noting how ‘indirect affordability benefits […]
M. Nethercote
flow from encouraging people to rent’ (Build-to-rent could deliver 3500
jobs, AFR, November 10, 2020: 32). With a blind eye to the jarring re­
alities of proposed rental premiums, such narrations recall Brill and
Durrant’s (2020) assessment of the narratives of London’s BTR actors as
simplistic.
Another notable set of examples concern the media’s disavowal of
discrepancies between investor strategies and the ‘tenant promise’
outlined above. Reporting stressed how imperatives for operational ef­
ficiencies and long-term tenant retention revised incentives to de­
velopers and operators, thereby ensuring BTR would deliver diverse,
well-designed accommodation optimally designed and managed for
renters. Only a forensic reading surfaces local BTR’s definitional ambi­
guities and its sectoral diversity, including through minor references to
BTR actors’ multiple opportunistic acquisitions of suburban homes in
Perth and Adelaide and acquisition/retention of build-to-sell strata
apartments buildings for operation as BTR, either as developers strug­
gled to sell apartments and pivoted or as investors capitalised on stalling
apartment sales. These build-to-sell-now-rented projects were not purpose
built for renting and therefore susceptible to the very design and con­
struction deficiencies plaguing Australia’s strata apartment sector that
BTR actors were claiming BTR bypassed.
Relatedly, reporting largely glossed over tensions between some BTR
investors’ shorter timeframes for asset ownership and the oft-cited
15–20 years ownership upon which BTR’s security of tenure was sup­
posedly premised. Disregarding these tensions, reporting described, for
instance, investors who envisaged BTR as ‘a temporary plan in the face
of weak (condo) pre-sales’ and planned to convert to strata (condo­
minium) ownership once more profitable (e.g. How the UK got BTR
going as a sector, AFR, August 22, 2019) and other investors who
conceded plans to retain their BTR assets for only six to ten years (e.g.
Developer considers build-to-rent apartments, AFR, November 1,
2018).16 The media’s resort to perfunctory definitions of BTR helped
disguise this diversity and its implications, skimming over both how the
BTR moniker encompasses heterogenous design, quality and rental
submarkets and diverse operational arrangements and investment stra­
tegies. These realities shine through in a systematic analysis, however,
and are corroborated by sporadic direct media references to BTR di­
versity or hybridity, including mentions of build-to-rent-to-sell models,
where tenants are eligible to buy their unit after a period of renting.
Other aspects of the financialization of rental housing are (strategi­
cally) ignored, namely those that might otherwise challenge the police
distribution of the sensible. Reflection on the legitimacy of BTR as a
necessary or even desirable evolution of our urban housing systems is
not debated and indeed amid such consistent storytelling certain things
do not appear up for debate and, over time, risk appearing undebatable.
While column inches might justify somewhat shallow reporting, there is
a failure to mention, let alone engage with, the deleterious socio-spatial
fallout of rental housing financialization abroad despite evidence of
worsening housing affordability and gentrification-induced displace­
ment (e.g. Fields & Uffer, 2016), tenant displacement (Fields, 2015) and
steeper rents and utility costs and issues with service quality, tenancy
contracts and design outcomes (e.g. García-Lamarca, 2020; Janoschka
et al., 2020). There is no air-time given to BTR renters’ representation
either and reporting mostly fails to mention, for instance, how
16
This highlights considerable definitional ambiguities surrounding Austra­
lian build to rent. Rare commentary points directly to related tensions, such as
the case of a build-to-sell apartment (condo) developer seeking to expose BTR
as a ‘sector is dominated by “build-to-sell” developers masquerading as build-
to-rent operators which rent unsold units temporarily … To us it reads “can’t
sell so rent”’ (Planning reform paramount for build-to-rent, AFR, September 10,
2019). The cost of conversions, re-design or retrofits of acquired build-to-sell
apartment buildings, whether to improve operating efficiencies or upgrade
shared amenities, would meanwhile likely be recouped by BTR actors,
including through higher rents.
10
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
multifamily construction has also been condemned as subpar, including
because it is often only built to last its expected asset shelf life of 20 years
(e.g. Building industry crisis a distressing legacy of the past, AFR, July
25, 2019). Cherry-picked instead, especially in the early days, are
descriptive accounts singing the praises of multifamily housing in US
global cities, with niche projects in New York City and other global cities
portrayed as representative of the sector at-large, typically through
hyped-up personal impressions of participants and vested interests
returning from industry-sponsored field-trips. Readers are encouraged
to accept the scale and maturity of the US multifamily sector as proxies
for BTR’s legitimacy, while being kept largely blind to other ‘uncom­
fortable knowledge’ or ‘inconvenient facts’ (McGoey, 2012b pp.12; 3).
These depoliticized accounts of BTR were imbued with authority
through sustained and largely unified endorsement by BTR ‘experts’ and
a ream of RESC/industry reports. Together, such reporting largely closed
off space for challenging the police order of the sensible around Australian
BTR expansion and in turn denied the equality of alternative voices and
‘sensible evidences’ that might otherwise have challenged those existing
inequalities that ultimately distinguish whose voices are listened to
(Dikeç, 2012; Davidson and Iveson, 2015).17 Reporting that was blink­
ered and at times silent on the less palatable aspects of market expansion
corroborates ‘the shared willingness of individuals to band together in
dismissing unsettling knowledge’ (McGoey, 2012a, p. 570) in these
media forums and the media’s hand, as platform and actor, in actively
disavowing certain knowledges and cultivating ‘strategic unknowns’
around BTR. Not up for debate, in these forums at least, are the kinds of
arguments that broaden or revise these frames of reference for under­
standing and evaluating BTR expansion. Left in the dark are arguments
that might cue readers to critically appraise an expansion of the role of
institutional investors in urban rental housing, arguments that might
challenge assumptions and terms of reference that make BTR expansion
thinkable as benign, arguments that counterpose the consensus around
BTR by instead ‘gestur[ing] towards the kind of verification of equality
that characterizes Rancière’s politics’ (Ruez, 2013: 1139). Without
those arguments, what can be argued in broadsheet media remains
neatly contained, with the common object appearing rather tame and
benign: a financial asset, with significance to many (homeowning)
urban inhabitants only in so much as it might stimulate the economy and
improve the rental sector in its wake. The Australian media participates
in establishing ‘regimes of sensibility’ in the Rancièrian sense (Dikeç,
2012: 673), not as the outcomes of ‘peaceful discussion and reasonable
agreement’ but rather through largely unwavering storylines that help
annul dissensus (Rancière et al., 2001: np). This enables a politics of
legitimacy and acquiescence to unfold, as what is left undisclosed or
muted helps curtails other BTR sense-making possibilities or in­
terpretations (Swyngedouw, 2007). This willing oversight, this fore­
closing of disagreement, and the locking out other voices from
contributing with authority in turn helps efface, I argue, the politics of
build to rent. This calls to mind Swyngedouw (2018: 604) summation of
post-democracy, as having ‘replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus
with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus,
agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental man­
agement’ and wherein ‘expert knowledge’ wipes out potential dissensus
17
As Brigstocke et al. (2021: page) write: ‘Rather than seeing authority as the
opposite of equality, we suggest that it is always in tension with equality – a
tension that can be productive and creative. A geographical aesthetics of au­
thority, therefore, demands further analysis of whether and how some authority
relations might help build and sustain collaborative settings, spaces and ma­
terials for making new claims to equality.’
M. Nethercote
and conflict and ‘neutralizes the political agency’ of those excluded
(Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, p. 13; also Dean, 2009, pp. 21–24).18
8. Conclusion
This article identifies a post-political strategy around Australian
rental housing financialization. It argues that as a nascent build to rent
market emerged, traditional news media contributed to a process of
post-politicization by circumscribing BTR debate within select co­
ordinates, delimiting its frames of reference and broadcasting the voices
those who assumed authority to speak. A Rancièrian aesthetic approach,
guided by Dikeç’s (2013) heuristics, foregrounds how media reporting
strategically limited the coordinates of public BTR debate by delineating
how BTR was seen and interpreted by news-reading audiences. BTR,
readers were encouraged to understand, was a promising new local asset
class whose expansion was in the national economic interest. With
asset-centric representations and conceptualisations of BTR rarely
challenged in these forums, reporting contributed to the construction of
a technocratic consensus around this latest wave of housing financiali­
zation. Curated storylines arguably tapped into public sentiment, capi­
talizing on economic uncertainty through recourse to hard-hitting
national economic interest arguments, with intermittent vague promises
BTR could ‘fix’ the housing crisis, a minor but universally compelling
subplot. Media reporting thus presents as an important technology
through which the distribution of the sensible around Australian BTR was
constructed, policed and reinforced. Reporting surfaced disagreements
surrounding local BTR expansion, certainly: the sector’s very viability
was contested in early reporting, for instance. And other perspectives
were tabled: BTR was presented as an aspirational rental tenure, albeit
less frequently and not without significant inconsistencies. Rarely dis­
cussed, let alone challenged, however was the desirability of this new
housing tenure as an alternative paradigm for owning and managing
urban housing nor indeed the legitimacy of intensifying the local
financialization of rental housing through BTR market expansion.
Australian news media had good reason to collaborate with BTR
industry actors in this post-politicization of BTR, with its own techno-
managerial imperatives and real estate interests as tabled above (also
see Murray & Frijters, 2017). Verification of such claims requires in­
terviews with journalists or, better yet, newsroom ethnographies,
without doubt. Nevertheless, there is strong corroborating evidence of
Australian property lobbyists’ interactions with local media, including
the way these actors contact reporters, author letters to editors, engage
in press releases and publicize their research findings (Jacobs, 2015).
Such claims are also consistent with understandings of Australia’s
problematic news media ecosystem, with its concentrated ownership
undermining diversity and independence in journalism.
Strategically curated BTR storylines effectively inhibit critical public
reflection on expanding institutional ownership of rental housing in
Australia. Few Australians have personal or professional experiences of
BTR and BTR sector immaturity perhaps provides little impetus for
urban inhabitants to seek out alternative sources of information on
rental housing financialization. Since less knowledgeable news audi­
ences are known to be especially impressionable (Scheufele & Tewks­
bury, 2007, p. 14; McCombs & Valenzuela, 2020), readers risk
internalising narrow conceptions of BTR. Traditional news media
arguably retains appeal as a forum for contributing to the
post-politicization of BTR, given their audience reach and relative
audience trust despite evolving news ecosystems. Consistent BTR
storylines across these traditional, authoritative news outlets likely
18
Recall that the political concerns actions that seek recognition including by
challenging what is known. Political change transpires in the moments of
dissensus, disagreements and antagonisms, and the counter-accounts these
furnish; politics brings about dissensus, disentangling consensus and re-
establishing the sensible (Mouffe, 2013).
11
Political Geography 98 (2022) 102654
amplify these ‘media effects’, as a low-trust (digital) media landscape
encourages readers to scan multiple outlets with reporting consistency
taken as a proxy for factual accuracy and argument merit (Happer &
Philo, 2013). Side-lined and oftentimes suppressed is discussion of the
implications and complexities institutionalizing rental housing; instead
risks associated with the corporate takeover of private rental housing
stock are sanitised if not rejected, though these risks may be far-reaching
and long-lasting. Indeed given the rise of private renting, housing
unaffordability, issues of tenure insecurity and tenant (self)-­
representation and Australian superannuation (pension) funds in­
vestments interest in BTR, most urban inhabitants will be impacted in
some (indirect) way should BTR markets grow. This depolitization of
BTR assists the local construction of the BTR asset class, representing
vested interests in the most favourable light, including as part of
lobbying attempts to seduce constituents, the state, and even each other
(Author, under review).
While media storytelling appears an important depoliticization de­
vice, it is hardly failsafe. There are reasons to believe Australian news­
readers are not heavily engaged with such news, nor all-trusting of its
contents. The Digital News Report: Australia 2021, a longitudinal inter­
national survey coordinated by Reuters Institute for the Study of Jour­
nalism at Oxford University, reports declining interest in and
consumption of news, low trust in news media, and concerns (above
international averages) about false and misleading online information
(Park et al., 2021, p. 9). Moreover, those who read traditional news
media do not seek out housing-related content (if BTR reporting regis­
tered as such), around one quarter of Australians access news primarily
through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, including over half of Gen
Z—the future “Generation Rent”-ers (10–11) and one in five Australians
do not access any local news (Park et al., 2021, p. 16). A non-trivial share
of Australians may never read these curated BTR stories, albeit such
claims are qualified somewhat by the noted influence of traditional news
media on alternative news media content.
Crucially, even a cursory scan of alternative news sources corrobo­
rates that rental housing financialization is being (re)politicized in other
forums. As Dikeç (2013: 24) reminds us, there can be ‘multiple domains
of sensible evidences’ and moreover not ‘all parts of the population are
equally summoned by a given aesthetic regime’. International evidence,
in the absence of compelling local parallels, confirms that taken-for-
granted assumptions surrounding the financialization of rental hous­
ing are being challenged in public forums through greater scrutiny of the
role and implications of institutional investors in the provision and
management of housing. Moreover, this evidence confirms how rejigg­
ing the coordinates of debate can be market-shaping. In Dublin, for
instance, when German insurance behemoth Allianz walked away from
potential BTR investments, they cited the ‘potential reputation risk from
negative public commentary around large institutions owning and
renting properties here amid a housing crisis, and being cast as a so-
called cuckoo or vulture fund’ (Hancock, 2021: n.p.). In Berlin, the
(digital) campaign and advocacy work of grassroots activists, which
necessarily involved re-politicization of the activities of institutional
investors in public forums, including on social media and in left-leaning
news media, culminated in a successful 2021 referendum in response to
an expropriation campaign of some 240,000 units organised by Deutsche
Wohnen und Co. Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co). The
role of alternative (social) media in re-politicizing (and mounting
roadblocks to) the contemporary financializing project represent do­
mains of inquiry worthy of attention, as part of a vital program of
research newly seeking to understand the way the financialization of
(rental) housing is resisted but also realised politically from ‘bottom up
and inside out’ (Tapp, 2021).
Though the briefest of examples, these overseas cases document fo­
rums where broader debates on the financialization of rental housing
progresses towards offering the verifications of equality that underpin
Rancièrian politics by changing ‘our ways of perceiving the world and
modes of relating to it’, providing ‘disruptive episodes in the name of
M. Nethercote
equality’ (Dikeç, 2017, p. 53). Whether playing out through traditional
or social media, these processes of depoliticization have involved those
who have ‘no right to be counted as speaking beings’ (Rancière, 1999, p.
27), such as housing (rights) activists and tenant unions, making as­
sertions of equality, to use Rancièrian terminology. Such examples evi­
dence political possibilities in response to the rise of institutional
landlordism which have ‘allegedly been evacuated from the stage of
post-political techno-managerial governance’ (Swyngedouw, 2017, p.
57). Such re-politicization is no straightforward project, to be sure.
Within traditional media forums it is stymied by the entrenched power
relations surrounding contemporary media ecologies and vulnerable to
the risk that myriad disparate resistances might dilute and eventually
hamper a hegemonic counter-narrative.
These counterexamples are nonetheless important, foreshadowing
some important final qualifications on my argument surrounding the
post-politicization of Australian BTR. If this account of the depolitici­
zation of the financialization of rental housing in Australia conjures any
sense of representational ‘closure’, that requires correction, for post
politics is always ‘a tendency that has taken hold’ and not a fully realised
condition (Davidson and Iveson, 2015: 547). The police distribution of the
sensible is always open to challenge; the post political is never fully
foreclosed (Swyngedouw, 2017), never a ‘realised totality’ (Marchart,
2007, p. 161). Critiques of post political approaches (cf. Dikeç, 2017;
Swyngedouw, 2017) assert that by characterising situations as post
political, post politics risks becoming ‘yet another frame through which
we critique dominance, depoliticization and inequality’ (see Davidson
and Iveson, 2015: 547). Recognising this post-politicization as a ten­
dency rather than condition is therefore crucial, if we are to avoid a
designation of public debate on BTR as ‘post-political’ having ‘the per­
verse effect of reinforcing, rather than undermining, the perception that
“there is no alternative”’ (Davidson and Iveson, 2015: 546). The loose
ends and contradictions within these media stories of BTR should be
viewed as opportunities for re-politicization, opportunities for new
forms of recognition to unsettle the prevailing aesthetic regime. Politics
cannot escape the police order certainly, but as Rancière (1999: 31; also
Blakey, 2020: 8) recognizes, far better is a police order that leans into the
‘breaking and entering’ of disagreements, so as to stretch the coordinates
of debate. Academics, for their part, might engage in a form of ‘public
geography’ by challenging what is known about BTR in ways that might
‘shoot tiny arrows in the media behemoth … [and] open up small rips
through which change can be effected’ (for discussion: Kitchin et al.,
2013a, p. 69; 2013b).
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the editor Filippo Menga and reviewers for their helpful
feedback. This research was undertaken with funding from Australian
Research Council DECRA Award (DE200100521).
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