Institutional investment in rental housing in the city of social housing

Abstract

While scholarly and public attention on institutional investors in rental housing is considerable, studies that quantify the relevance of such actors are still rare. This article measures institutional investor ownership in a European city with one of the highest shares of social housing: Vienna, Austria. We present a novel approach to measure institutional investor ownership that combines land registry data with the international company database ORBIS and Vienna’s local housing register. This provides unique ownership data for the entire housing market at the property level. We measure the role of institutional investors in different rental tenures and further distinguish between direct and indirect property owners, between national, EU, and non-EU investors, and conduct a geographical analysis of investment hotspots. We make three broader contributions: First, we widen the geography of research on institutional investment by considering a highly regulated housing market context. Second, we demonstrate that a large social housing stock does not per se prevent a significant presence of institutional investors. Third, we introduce a method that may be used in other cases and contexts.