Resurgent landlordism in a student city: urban dynamics of private rental growth

Abstract

Many countries have seen a remarkable revival of private-rental housing markets in recent years. Academic literature so far has focused on theorizing the political-economic drivers of reinvestment in the tenure or on charting aggregate trends. This paper adds to these literatures in several ways based on a fine-grained analysis of housing market transformations in Groningen, a medium-sized university city in The Netherlands. First, we reveal the variegated trajectories through which private-rental growth materializes on the ground and untangle the role of different types of landlords. While small-scale private landlords remain dominant, we find a clear and important trend toward property concentration. Second, we highlight variations in spatial investment strategies across landlord types. Third, we reveal how contemporary dynamics of increased landlordism play out in a medium-sized city, embedded in a context of national private rental resurgence and local housing market pressures of a growing student city.