The role of (changing) consultants and data in the market for sustainable, financialized, real estate markets

This article explores the politics of expertise in financialized real estate markets. It questions: What expertise is valued in decision-making? How does the type of knowledge demanded by market actors reflect a prioritization of particular forms of expertise and their corresponding experts? In turn, what does this mean for how problems, in this case the question of sustainable property, are understood and navigated in real estate markets? To explore these questions, I interrogate the motivations behind sourcing experts and data in Zurich’s property market. Drawing from interviews with investors and consultants in sustainable real estate, I explore how financial sector sustainability agendas become usable in urban contexts. Building on ideas from the politics of expertise and knowledge coalitions, I show how sustainability is translated into financial(ized) processes: increasing demand for finance-aligned data and consultancies. This reconfigures urban expertise and renders sustainability a financial issue with an urban materiality, rather than an urban issue with financial roots.