digital real estate technologies

This project explores how spatial data standardization practices shape the design and use of real estate technologies. Focusing on housing in the U.S. real estate industry, it asks: how do standards, standardizing practices, and the institutions that enforce those practices affect housing? During my dissertation research, I became particularly interested in the multiple listing service (MLS), a set of rules and regulations for how professionalized Realtors must share spatial real estate data....

This research draws on critical transparency studies to consider the role of transparency in financial systems, and particularly data brokerage platforms. Data brokers are economic actors who collect data as an asset and lease its use to various clients. Data brokers are often lauded as a corrective to the opacity of financial markets—an ostensibly good thing, as lots of retrospectives on the 2007-2008 financial crisis identified a lack of transparency into the complicated chains of subprime debt ownership as a key driver of the market crash....

Conducted as part of my MA research between 2017 and 2019, this research explores how short-term rental platforms—particularly Airbnb—reconfigured people’s relationships to the places where they lived. Drawing on fieldwork in New Orleans, LA, I found that platforms like Airbnb enrolled people into uneven processes of value capture. By slingshotting travelers into non-touristy, highly residential neighborhods, Airbnb leveraged the emotional labor of proximate neighbors in the process of capturing value for the platform....