Abstract
This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors. A recurring critique in recent years has been the minimal acknowledgment of investor heterogeneity particularly in relation to urban development and the financialization of housing. Yet, to date, there is no systematic evidence supporting these contentions. Therefore, we conducted an exhaustive literature review of residential investment landscapes through the Web of Science citation database in the following fields: Urban and regional planning, geography, sociology, urban studies, public administration, and economics. Subsequently, we methodically searched for the types of investors addressed, and investor categories employed, in journal articles published between 2000 and 2019. Following a meta-categorization of the results, we demonstrate how existing literature differentiates investors in terms of their spatial scale of operation, size and social composition, investment object and finance, or investment and social behavior. Additionally, we highlight the key topics and issues addressed in the reviewed literature within each meta-category. We propose to turn the four meta-categories into a multidimensional analytical framework as a point of departure for a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of investor differentiations, a tool that is urgently needed in Planning Studies and related disciplines. Furthermore, we argue that mixed method approaches combining hard and quantifiable with soft behavioral investor characteristics, as well as institutional analyses combining structural considerations with actors’ agency, are indispensable to disentangle contemporary residential property market dynamics.
Highlights
This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors
The review is based on a systematic analysis of literature on residential investment landscapes that we conducted through the Web of Science citation database following a preselection of the database’s subject categories: Urban and regional planning, geography, sociology, urban studies, public administration, and economics
We argue that the one-dimensional approaches that many journal articles convey are insufficient to capture the diversity of investors in today’s volatile residential property markets and hamper both nuanced empirical analyses and theoretical advancements on the links between finance and the residential built environment
Summary
This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors. That were mentioned within these 642 articles and manually grouped them to let the data “speak.” four thematic areas emerged to which we could assign all individual entries: it resulted in the cornerstone of our own analysis, namely, a metacategorization of existing investor types and categories employed in the literature. This meta-categorization differentiates investors in terms of their (i) spatial scale of operation, (ii) size and social composition, (iii) investment object and finance, and (iv) investment and social behavior. This article combines different levels of analysis, providing meta-categorization, an overview of residential property investor types, and a more classic literature review
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