Institutional investment in urban housing markets: Global trends, local manifestations and the state

This special issue examines the evolving relationship between the state and institutional investors in the financialization of housing across Europe. Moving beyond narratives that cast the state merely as an enabler, it reconceptualizes housing financialization as a relational process anchored in a state–investor nexus, a dynamic and contested field in which the boundaries between regulation, deregulation, and non-regulation blur through the interplay of financial strategies, political lobbying, and social contestation. Drawing on comparative insights from the Housing Policy under the Condition of Financialization (HoPoFin) project, the contributions demonstrate that housing financialization advances not through straightforward market liberalization, but through the contradictions, loopholes, and frictions embedded within state policies and governance practices. Together, the articles reveal that financialization is contingent, uneven, and geographically embedded, unfolding through both collaboration and conflict between state and non-state actors. By adopting a conjunctural and comparative perspective, the special issue foregrounds the co-production of financialized housing markets and regulatory frameworks, calling for renewed attention to the political economy of the state, the variegated geographies of financialization, and the contested processes through which housing is continually reconstituted as a vehicle for capital accumulation.