Author Archives: knut

#regulateProperty: The Need for Human Rights-driven Real Estate Regulation and Market Alternatives

Since the beginning of the year the “International Working Group for the Promotion of Market Regulation and Market Alternatives at Habitat III” has tried to advocate for an inclusion of socially grounded regulations of markets that stop the speculation and treat housing, land and mortgage as goods for people and not for profit. This article tries to sum up some of the findings of these debates.

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Financialization of Mass Rental Housing in Germany: Understanding the Transaction Cycles in the Mass Rental Housing Sector 1999–2015

in:Barbara Schönig | Sebastian Schipper (Eds.): Urban Austerity: Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Cities in Europe, Verlag Theater der Zeit 2016

1. Introduction
In Germany, since 1999, more than three million rental housing units have been traded in the context of
large‐scale transactions. Sales to “financial investors” played a dominant role among these transactions. In
this article, I propose elements for a narrative that may help to understand the reasons for these
transactions.

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