Corporate landlords in Latin America: Notes to an ongoing debate

Introduction

Corporate landlords seem to be transforming real estate markets across various geographies, a trend that has accelerated following the global financial crisis. Their role in urban housing markets has been linked to the financialisation of rental housing (Fields and Uffer, 2016); however, much of this academic debate has centred on the ‘Global North’, where the phenomenon has been better documented. This focus, while understandable, raises the question of how corporate landlordism operates in peripheral economies, as different forms of housing financialisation are emerging in most countries.

In aiming to contribute to current debates, the focus of this paper is on Latin America, a region that has witnessed a recent, albeit fragmented, body of research on the role of corporate landlords. There is a growing consensus that financial capital is increasingly driving the most advanced forms of real estate development, particularly in countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Chile. In fact, these countries have become the primary focal points for research, with Brazilian-based scholars leading much of the academic inquiry and a limited number of publications coming from other cities in the region.

Despite some agreements, the influence of corporate landlords on housing markets remains a point of contention. Some have argued that the presence of institutionalised landlords is too limited in the region to impact housing markets significantly (Blanco et al., 2014), while others recently contended that in Chile and Brazil, rental housing has recently become an asset class (Marín-Toro, 2024; Rolnik et al., 2024) and that corporate landlords might already be driving real estate price appreciation in city centres (Rufino, 2024).

Much of the discourse is still in its early stages as researchers deal with a phenomenon that is both relatively limited in scope and tied to longstanding structural conditions. This commentary contributes to the evolving conversation by critically examining the relationship between corporate landlords and rental housing financialisation in Latin America. It focuses on how corporate landlords exploit favourable market conditions created by regulatory frameworks, employ opportunistic financial strategies and adapt to the region’s structural challenges–such as financial volatility, income inequality, informal labour markets, and fragile social protections. As argued throughout this commentary, these conditions impel a higher degree of flexibility from capital, allowing it to navigate volatile environments while hedging against risks through state support. Despite the promise of high returns, housing investment in the region is far from straightforward, explaining why corporate landlords adopt strategies that differ from those in more stable real estate markets.

This commentary draws on my work in real estate studies, rather than on specific expertise in social movement scholarship. However, the ideas developed in this text draw heavily on the rich contributions of leading urban Latin American scholars. Needless to say, the goal here is to trace general trends in the largest economies of ‘Latin America’ as a whole rather than presenting a needed nuanced analysis of the heterogeneity and uneven trajectories. However, given the early stages of the debate, these investigations could serve as a platform to inform future inquiries.

The commentary is organised as follows. First, I provide an overview of the literature discussing the expansion of corporate landlords. Following this, I offer an interpretation of the significant constraints faced by landlords when assembling large property portfolios in Latin America. Finally, I explore these flexible arrangements and the potential they offer to capital, vis-à-vis their relative invisibility to housing social movements.

The rise of corporate landlords in Latin America?

Corporate landlords have recently diversified into the housing segment in Latin America due to a growing integration of real estate markets into global capital flows. Unlike their established, although variegated presence in major cities of the ‘Global North’– where financialised landlordism has a longer history – this phenomenon developed after the regional crises of 2014 (Rufino, 2024) ¹ when saturated and increasingly risky real estate markets in advanced economies drove investors to seek higher returns in the ‘Global South’ (Fernandez and Aalbers, 2020), where Latin America’s construction boom, growing middle class and open real estate markets offered attractive opportunities.

The basis for this shift was set during the 1990s. While built-to-rent schemes were dominant in the early 20th century and tenants’ movements were organising important strikes (like Buenos Aires 1907, Mexico 1922, Santiago and Panama in 1925, Barranquilla and Bogotá 1921–1930), homeownership growth marked most of the century (Blanco et al., 2014). However, when neoliberalism hit in the 1970s and 1990s, public housing programs were significantly reduced, while the private sector – backed by strong state derisking – took on a more prominent role in housing provision. This transition mirrored the broader neoliberal reforms, which paved the way for institutional players to enter Latin American real estate markets. ² To recall, this well-known neoliberal shift in housing policy was characterised by:

As discussed in the literature, the erosion of social rental housing in some European cities has pushed more households into the private rental sector (PRS) over the last few decades, thereby increasing their reliance on private and corporate landlords (Aalbers et al., 2021). In Berlin, for example, rental housing financialisation was enabled by large-scale privatisation (Fields and Uffer, 2016; Wijburg et al., 2018), while massive foreclosures, evictions and steep property price drops were at the base of what happened in Spain, where the PRS was marginal until the post-crisis period (Byrne, 2019; García-Lamarca, 2020). Displacement was thus an opportunity for banks to sell distressed assets, a structural context that later shaped important social movements in the country (see in this Special Issue: Bonshoms-Guzman, 2025; Martínez and Gil, 2025). Similarly, the housing market collapse of 2008 led to large-scale foreclosure in the US, which ultimately enabled a rescaling of tenants’ movements in cities like San Francisco (see in this Special Issue: Gustavussen, 2025).

In Latin America, the temporality of these processes is rather different. In the late 1990s, neoliberalism showed its limits, leading to several significant crashes in ‘emerging markets’. On the basis of this ‘creative destruction’, the region experienced a housing boom driven by a surge in commodity prices, rising per capita income and developmentalist political projects in several countries (Socoloff and Rufino, 2020). These factors further attracted international capital in the context of low international interest rates; however, this increase in housing production did not necessarily result in greater housing access or affordability. Hence, by the 2010 censuses, there was clear evidence of a growing percentage of tenancy in these traditional owner-occupied countries that touched both the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ markets (Blanco et al., 2014; Link and Marín-Toro, 2023; Rolnik et al., 2024). ³ The effects of the 2008 and 2014 crises further deepened these trends:

These transformations paved the way for built-to-rent (BTR) developments in the region. Initially backed by retail investors, others soon found these investments attractive due to high returns driven by rising housing prices. Real estate firms and funds that have historically mainly focused on housing production (Rufino et al., 2021; Shimbo, 2019) or the commercial sector (David, 2013; Fix, 2007; Gasca Zamora and Castro Martínez, 2021; Magnani et al., 2024; Rufino et al., 2021; Socoloff, 2015, 2021) saw the opportunity to shift a part of their portfolios towards multifamily housing.

Although corporate landlords vary broadly across geographies and their impact on housing markets ought not to be overstated (Messamore, 2023), their profit-driven strategies have been shown to: (a) exacerbate housing insecurity (Fields and Vergerio, 2022; Nic Lochlainn, 2023); (b) impose higher rates of eviction practices, harassment and legal suppression of tenants’ activism to increase tenant turnover (Crosby, 2020; Gomory, 2022); and (c) exploit regulatory loopholes to circumvent regulations to maximise returns (Hangen and O’Brien, 2025; Kadıoğlu and Listerborn, 2025; Nic Lochlainn, 2023). However, their investments are highly selective– in terms of both market segment and geographic focus (Halbert and Attuyer, 2016). Corporate landlords tend to concentrate their acquisitions in high-demand areas, leveraging population growth and favourable regulatory environments (Fields and Vergerio, 2022). Some investors focus on the single-family rental sector (Charles, 2020; Christophers, 2023), while others have concentrated on large-scale multifamily acquisitions. Urban centres are often preferred targets, as seen in Dublin, where corporate landlords concentrate on middle- and high-income tenants by upgrading properties and raising rents (Nic Lochlainn, 2023), thereby accelerating gentrification (August and Walks, 2018).

In Latin America, selectivity initially took the form of multifamily buildings used for temporary rentals in well-located areas, leveraging urban renovations, growing tourism and the platform/sharing economy (e.g. Airbnb). This wave was oriented towards tourists and affluent segments, such as wealthy students, young professionals and expats, offering luxurious, centrally located developments (González Loyde, 2023; Marín-Toro, 2024; Rufino, 2024; Urbina Julio, 2024).

Meanwhile, the growth of other proptech platforms – especially in Brazil’s largest cities – facilitated a degree of indirect corporate penetration into the housing market. One good example is the Brazilian-born ‘unicorn’ firm QuintoAndar. As the fourth largest platform in the region, it has attracted international institutional investors to operate in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Mexico. While the company started as a digital broker, it later expanded to handling pre-contract rental processes (including creating financial instruments to replace traditional guarantors or analysing renters’ creditworthiness), property management of multifamily buildings in partnership with developers, and trading of fine-grained market data. According to Rolnik and colleagues, proptechs like QuintoAndar were key to the commodification and ‘formalization’ via rental contracts of existing relationships operating in ‘informal’ precarious spaces. ⁵

Regarding who the investors are, and although data is scarce, they typically involve the usual suspects: (1) traditional conglomerates and elites via ‘family offices’; (2) national institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies (through Real Estate Investment Trusts – REITs – or direct ownership); (3) large national real estate brokers and developers; (4) international investors, such as Greystar (operating in Chile, Mexico and Brazil) or Brookfield (operating in Brazil); and (5) retail investors via REIT participation or minority property acquisition, with management handed to operators (FTSE-NAREIT, 2024; Sanfelici and Magnani, 2023; Tonin, 2020; Urbina Julio, 2024).

As for instruments, since the 1990s, real estate capital pooling in Latin America has been facilitated by real estate funds (such as REITs). This form of capital centralisation allows corporate landlords across the globe to: (a) gain significant liquidity to tackle opportunistic acquisitions; (b) shift the rental market away from smaller landlords; (c) put pressure to collect other income streams, such as fees beyond rent; and (d) increase their market share, to the point of being able to gear or even control ‘market prices’. However, the role of listed funds in the private rental sector in Latin America remains limited; for instance, Mexico City has only two multifamily buildings owned by listed REITs (Echarri Cotler, 2024), and Buenos Aires has none (Socoloff, 2021). Although significantly more prevalent in Brazil and Chile, REIT-type funds are still not dominant in the multifamily PRS in Santiago (Tonin, 2020) compared to direct ownership by investors.

Limits to capital? Flexible, temporal and dynamic arrangements in the pooling of properties

Despite various factors facilitating the concentration of property in the hands of corporate landlords in Latin America, ownership seems to remain predominantly fragmented, with the PRS still mainly characterised by single property ownership, as reported in the past (Blanco et al., 2014). In this section, I examine some of the limits to the assembling of property portfolios, which mirror deeper characteristics of the housing provision systems.

In Latin America, pooling a long-term housing portfolio remains a challenge due to the region’s persistent macroeconomic volatility. This volatility is characterised by recurrent crises, price – fluctuations—including sharp swings in exchange rates and commodity prices – and fluctuating international capital flows (Abeles et al., 2018). Although ‘real assets’ have traditionally served as a store of value and a hedge against volatility, the large volume of landed capital required, along with the high costs of managing these investments, makes housing a ‘costly’ segment for investors to develop in a volatile environment. The former is especially true when considering the additional factors of fluctuating real estate cycles, shifting regulations, and private banks’ reluctance to fund long-term projects.

To address these macroeconomic issues and attract financial investors into the housing sector, governments have consistently implemented derisking strategies, responding to demands from both the private sector and multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank (Royer, 2009; Socoloff and Rufino, 2020). These state-led derisking policies are varied, transectoral and transcalar: they range from tax exemptions, subsidies and urban planning reforms (Jaramillo, 2021) to more direct actions such as providing privileged data, educating investors and dedicating bureaucratic resources to facilitate and accelerate investments. In times of austerity, regulations became more flexible and allowed landlords to shift macroeconomic risks onto borrowers or state agencies. ⁶ As a result, state derisking has paved the way for the expansion of rental housing financialisation, albeit unevenly across the region and dynamically over time.

State derisking also plays a central role in the investment strategies of traditional conglomerates – controlled by the wealthiest families – that have historically profited from extractive and rent-seeking practices. These business groups are important ‘corporate landlords’, but they hedge against risks through diversification and lobbying strategies, shifting opportunistically between sectors or business segments. For these conglomerates, infrastructure, rural, corporate, commercial and industrial properties are considered safer investments (David, 2013; Rufino et al., 2023). Their involvement in housing developments or rental housing is typically flexible and temporary, occurring only when favourable conditions align (Socoloff, 2021).

Besides state derisking, proptechs have also helped corporate landlords mitigate risks by connecting local and global firms (Rolnik et al., 2024). Technological innovations offered by proptechs are nowadays supporting the processes of tenant screening, price inflation and contract ‘formality’, as we mentioned (Kalinoski and Procopiuck, 2022; Laguyás et al., 2022). However, in a region marked by inequality, labour informality and weak social protections, even the most speculative funds face challenges in reaching lower-income populations without public funding. State derisking thus becomes essential to financialised real estate ventures, not an exception.

As a result, rental housing financialisation heavily depends on public money’s creation of ‘private’ opportunities, which are typically limited to the wealthiest states in the region. Without public funding, passing the risks down the chain to municipalities, smaller local landlords or tenants might seem practical, but there is little to redistribute in countries with low capital accumulation. Hence, while this type of arrangement has been observed in Brazilian slums (Rolnik et al., 2021), the extent to which it is prevalent elsewhere in the region remains unknown.

Contradictions within the construction sector further hinder property consolidation under corporate control. The financialisation of rental housing relies on scale, requiring corporate landlords to amass large and diverse portfolios to meet market demands. In Latin America, however, the lack of a pool of privatised or distressed properties to acquire means that investments are channelled into build-to-rent initiatives focused on high-end multifamily projects. These projects require sizeable urban land parcels, regulatory exemptions and rapid construction to be completed before the next economic downturn. Achieving such scale demands technological advancements, machinery and labour capacity – resources that are largely lacking in the region’s construction sector, with only the largest companies able to meet these requirements.

Corporate landlords seeking to consolidate property portfolios are also aware that enforcing property rights and claims takes place in a region where full housing commodification remains elusive (Pírez, 2018). On the one hand, tenant evictions and violent land clearances, particularly in areas with potential for rent gap extraction, are frequent. However, legal evictions ⁷ and repossessions are often costly and bureaucratic for financial institutions, requiring lengthy court proceedings and judicial approval in most countries.

On the other hand, traditional housing movements, alongside emerging tenants’ movements, continue to actively resist the commodification agenda. Although housing movements often see rental housing as a temporary condition (for Brazil, see Nascimento, 2021), social movements have directed some demands concerning rental conditions at state authorities, particularly during the pandemic. In Argentina, tenant movements have been active in advancing a legislative agenda (Labiano, 2025; Rosanovich, 2022), which led to the passage of a rent control law by Congress in 2020. However, as D’Adda and Kusiak (2025) highlight in this Special Issue, the limitations of legislative action became evident: in Argentina, a presidential decree was passed during the first week of Milei’s administration in 2023, dismantling these protections.

To sum up, in my view, these conditions create a scenario where capital requires a degree of flexibility to hedge against the compounding of perceived risks. As a result, rental housing financialisation may not follow the typical pattern of a growing portfolio controlled by asset managers, as seen in more stable economies. Instead, when it comes to housing, capital tends to move more quickly and opportunistically, shifting risks and masking itself to social movements, especially outside the niche areas in the wealthiest cities in the region.

Conclusion

The purpose of this commentary was to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the role of corporate landlords in Latin America and the contestations surrounding rental housing financialisation, as discussed by scholars in this Special Issue. While research beyond core cities remains limited and the debate is still evolving, I have drawn from a scattered yet rich body of literature on housing financialisation and corporate landlordism, incorporating insights from both ‘Global North’ and Latin American scholars.

One of the arguments presented in this commentary is that while corporate landlordism is emerging in Latin America, its presence is already drawing the attention of researchers, particularly Brazilian-based scholars. This phenomenon is part of a broader trend of neoliberalisation, housing financialisation and the commodification and potential assetisation of rental housing. However, the dynamics of this process in Latin America differ somehow from those observed elsewhere due to the region’s socio-economic context – marked by financial volatility, inequality and a long history of rent extraction by elite landholders.

As discussed throughout this commentary and echoed in the literature on real estate financialisation, the financialisation of rental housing is highly selective, with only some niche segments found in Latin America. Corporate landlords have primarily targeted high-value urban areas and wealthier populations, where they can secure substantial returns with relatively low risk. As a result, rental housing financialisation has been concentrated in multifamily developments in a few major cities, such as São Paulo, Santiago and Mexico City. This selectivity means that large segments of the population, particularly those in informal housing markets and low-income groups, remain beyond the reach of corporate landlords. However, these gaps are often filled through state derisking strategies, proptechs, or smaller landlords who absorb the risks and mediate these relationships.

In practice, when it comes to sectors such as student housing, co-living, Airbnb developments, or even informal housing, property ownership is more likely to be fragmented, with retail investors holding individual properties and proptechs managing the transactions and mediating these relationships. This is in contrast to a single-property scheme controlled by a corporate landlord. In my view, these fragmented arrangements stem from the constraints in assembling large portfolios, as previously described.

As a result, the financialisation of rental housing in Latin America remains a flexible and adaptive process, with shorter investment cycles, frequent disinvestment and sector switching being essential strategies for hedging against the region’s macroeconomic volatility. Thus, what might look like weak capital centralisation (the relatively low and limited presence of corporate landlords) should be instead viewed as a deliberate corporate strategy to keep a flexible arrangement in order to mitigate and transfer risks, often onto the weakest actors in the chain.

Therefore, as I have argued, a key driver behind the expansion of corporate landlords has been the role of state derisking. Governments have implemented a diverse range of policies to facilitate capital investment in housing, making the region’s markets more attractive to international investors. State derisking has also taken the form of legal adjustments that consistently favour the creation of investment vehicles, facilitating the flow of capital. While these policies have successfully attracted some investment, the situation differs from that in core cities, where profits are less reliant on weakened public funds and shifting political agendas that are forced to reproduce and create new, lucrative schemes for capital.

Finally, regarding resistance, one of the main challenges is that opposition to financialisation has not yet fully permeated social movements in the region. As corporate landlords and financial capital remain relatively invisible to these movements, organisations have tended to direct their demands towards the state through more traditional strategies. This invisibility may be due to the fact that these capital flows are not specialised but operate across multiple sectors simultaneously. Nevertheless, the critical academic works on rental housing financialisation might be gaining momentum in Latin America, revealing the ‘new’ strategies of ‘old’ financial capital.