British Academy / Leverhulme Trust award to investigate 'bid to rent'
Dr Elsa Noterman has been awarded funding to investigate rental 'bidding wars' among prospective house tenants in London.
Dr Elsa Noterman, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, has been awarded funding by the British Academy / Leverhulme Trust for a project titled "Bid to Rent." This will involve a collaboration with Dr Theo Barry Born, Research Associate at the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, and a former PhD student and lecturer in the School.
Rent inflation is a key dimension of the ‘cost of living’ crisis, and rent control has become part of the policy agenda in the UK, primarily in Scotland but with campaigns and municipal politicians advocating for similar measures in England nationally and locally to combat the displacement of tenants. Below these macroeconomic and policy concerns and the headline inflation numbers, there is a question about the techniques, practices, and negotiations that empower rentier actors to extract further value from tenants through rent increases in the case of individual properties and tenancies. Alongside formalised extractive mechanisms, informal tactics are being mobilised to inflate rental prices.
In this project Elsa and Theo will look to untangle these informal means, and specifically the rental 'bidding wars' taking place in London, where prospective tenants are being encouraged to blind bid against each other to secure a tenancy. They examine how these unregulated micro-speculations contribute to rent inflation and the increasing financialisation of housing. In doing so, they also consider how such research on the informal tools of rentier actors could inform both emergent policy proposals to address rental bidding and ongoing debates over rent control.