Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Digital Real Estate Technologies on Housing and Home in the US

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This project will investigate how the development of digital real estate technologies have affected social and economic dimensions of real estate transactions in US cities. Real estate transactions are increasingly affected by the data curated by digital real estate platforms and the algorithms underlying the presentation of data to home buyers. This digital transformation potentially affects the availability of financial instruments and the knowledge that home buyers acquire in the process of making real estate transactions. Importantly there may be differences and social justice issues relevant in how data are processed and curated for home buyers between and within cities. The objective of this research is to understand the disparate impacts of the digitalization of real estate transactions as well as the role of partnerships between city governments and the private sector in real estate markets. This research will explore how the design and use of data on web based real estate platforms creates new social and economic relationships to housing and home. This project will address whether these platforms create wider access to affordable housing, especially in terms of race and gender by drawing on concepts and theories from urban geography. The project will specifically ask how digital real estate platforms play a role in the financialization of housing, what knowledge users of digital real estate platforms acquire from these platforms and whether there are differential experiences by users from different socio-demographic groups. Interviews and focus groups with key actors in the real estate transaction process will be used to gain an understanding of the design and development of digital real estate platforms. Both archival research and participant observation will be used to additionally triangulate the findings from interviews and focus groups. Results will be disseminated to scholarly communities, through social media and through a podcast.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.