The Beds Economy: A New Scalar Frontier in Residential Property Markets

Under the pressures of financialization and assetization, a new scalar frontier is emerging across residential property markets in Europe and North America. Housing economies are looking increasingly like beds economies. Not apartments, not houses, but beds. Residential units are rapidly densifying and shrinking, centred evermore around sleeping spaces. Digital platforms are facilitating the fragmentation and leasing of bed spaces across housing typologies. The blurring of boundaries between residential and short-stay accommodation is becoming an endemic feature of urban real estate markets, revolving primarily around the renting of beds. Indeed, the ‘beds for rent’ asset class, encompassing everything from student housing to care homes, is among the fastest growing and most profitable real estate segments for global institutional investors. This paper discusses this new scalar frontier and identifies its political-economic, financial and social drivers. The analysis is substantiated with empirical evidence from a range of real estate sectors, highlighting the centrality of the bed to their form, function, valorization and capitalization. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this trend for housing inequality and injustice.