Financialization, affordable housing and urban governance: a spatio-temporal analysis of four South African REITs

Real estate investment trusts (REITs), spread from the United States since the 1960s, gathered momentum following the global financial crisis. In South Africa, REITs have operated since 2013, with only a few of the 27 REITS focused on residential investments. Although the four REITs with substantial residential portfolios, largely in “affordable housing”, meet a critical need in South Africa’s unequal housing landscape, it is crucial to examine the practices and effects of these apparently new actors. In conversation with a growing critical literature on the financialization of rental housing through REITS in cities around the world, we investigate how South African REITs with significant residential portfolios reflect the trends characterizing REITs globally but with contextual specificities. Our exploratory, spatio-temporally attuned analysis of these firms’ histories, ownership, performance and geographies reveals how South African affordable rental housing financialization is largely embedded within local capital markets with established local institutional investors and real estate actors that share longer histories of investment in affordable housing. These agents’ capacities and limits are critically shaped by national political-economic conditions, municipal service provision and historically produced built environments. Attention to such historical, place-based and multi-scalar relations are key in understanding REITs’ diverse trajectories across context.