Re-tracing the rise of institutional investor landlords in London and Milan through the lens of state de-risking

Research on housing financialisation in North America and Europe has explored the growing role of institutional investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds as both funders and owners of residential housing. Several investment waves and different entry points have been identified, from opportunistic acquisitions related to early public housing privatisations in Northern Europe, the predatory grabbing of distressed assets in the United States and Europe following the global financial crisis, to the more recent long-term corporate landlordism under ‘financialisation 2.0’. Following recent scholarship on the essential de-risking role of the state in this process, this article compares the rise of institutional investment in different Build-to-Rent sectors of London and Milan to bring new insights on the role of the state in de-risking urban space through ‘mega-event urbanism’. We show how the exceptional state intervention involved in making the London 2012 Olympics and the 2015 Milan Expo worked hand-in-glove with long-term neoliberal path dependencies and the global financial crisis to de-risk institutional investment in local rental markets and boost new asset class formation.