Amsterdam’s changing landscape of property investors

Research on property investors is slowly increasing in the spatial sciences (planning, urban studies, geography, etc.). However, very often the behaviour and agency of property investors is disregarded in existing analyses. Furthermore, establishing a link between investor behaviour and wider economic and regulatory processes is a challenging undertaking.

In this new paper, we (Tuna Tasan-Kok, Sara Özogul and Andre Legarza) established a novel approach and methodology to read changing property investor landscapes by linking wider economic and regulatory changes to investment actors and their investment strategies. With economic changes, we refer to shifts in property investment volumes and wider (national) economic changes in the wake of, for instance, an economic crisis. Regulatory changes indicate new property regulations, changes in taxes, planning policies, visions or targets issued by the public sector.

Empirically, we focused on the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam. We defined three distinct periods of analysis, based on transaction volumes and regulatory interventions at national and local levels: the pre-global financial crisis (GFC) period from 2005 to 2008, the post-GFC recovery period from 2009 to 2013, and the pre-Covid19 boom period from 2014 to 2020.

Our main finding is that to understand investor behaviour, different dimensions

of investor characteristics and behaviour should be analysed concurrently; investors’ scale of operation, ownership composition, type of capital, and locational and strategic behaviour help configure investment decisions in relation to property market shifts.

Only with a multidimensional analysis, based on quantiative and qualitative data, we are able to develop more targeted policy solutions, moving away from empirically ill-supported stereotypes of property actor behaviours.

The open-access paper has been published in European Urban and Regional Studies and is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09697764211021883