Institutional investors and the state: Reciprocal ‘catching-up’ in a ‘super-homeownership’ housing regime

This article analyses how institutional investors in residential real estate advanced in a context they describe as challenging. The article examines which local constellations and path dependencies directed institutional investors to and away from specific segments of the housing market. We argue that the subordinate state’s role in ensuring spatio-temporal fixes for global real estate and financial capital transformed over time under ‘catching-up’ pressures and narratives employed by supra-state and transnational actors. At the same time, there is a parallel ‘catching-up’ process of institutional investors striving to increase their presence in a market with limited room to penetrate, characterised by high homeownership rates and dominated by rather small private actors (‘super-homeownership’, as it has been called). We propose the concept of reciprocal ‘catching-up’ to reveal the specific challenges posed by the context of semi-peripheral financialisation in Central and Eastern Europe to institutional investors. Reciprocal ‘catching-up’ highlights that actors linked to global financial flows had to deal with local historical arrangements and small local actors, who make the market and subsequently dominate it, until the market is ready to ‘mature’ and gradually open to them. Given the contradictory dynamics between the global-national-local scales in semi-peripheral financialisation of housing, different actors seem to be catching up to the others – depending on the scale chosen as a vantage point and the particular historical moment.