Returning to the intermediary turn: rethinking the significance of estate agents for housing markets

Abstract

An intermediary turn in housing studies has argued that professionals like estate agents are causally significant to housing market outcomes. This theory leans on the concept of ‘professionalism’ in two ways. Firstly, agents’ professional identities build in them both the capacity and the motivation to affect the price setting mechanism. Secondly, agents’ professional identities are conceptualised as a political inheritance, and therefore something that can indicate how housing markets have been configured and constructed by the wider political context. This paper interrogates this theory, using it to study the significance of high-street estate agents to house price inflation in London. While the intermediary turn proposes a causal effect between agents’ work and price inflation, evidencing this causal effect was an empirical problem. Nevertheless the concept of professionalism was used to reveal a professional identity bound up in housing investment. We argue that this professionalism could be highly significant, offering an insight into the contextual political economy of housing.