In September 2021, more than 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. housing prices were at a peak, and a TikTok video went viral alleging that “a company that everyone used… to look for housing” was inflating home prices (Gotcher 2021). I was a year into this project, researching the real estate platforms that the video was calling out. Until then, the public seemed to consider these platforms harmless entertainment or online search tools. Their reach – across the entire U.S. housing market, with some including in-house sales teams, lending, and automatic purchasing – made them convenient and ubiquitous. But the pandemic had refocused public attention on the widening wealth gap, the inadequacies of the American social safety net, and the already-strained housing market. On top of this, many large technology companies, like Amazon, were seeing record profits even as much of the economy stagnated. (Figure 1 shows some threads on Twitter that exemplify the intersecting discussions of both housing and technology taking place during the study period.) Real estate platforms brought together housing and big tech, and suddenly that combination had people feeling suspicious – could these platforms be to blame for housing crisis? Most economic experts agreed that the housing market could not be influenced so simply, but this moment exposed a larger lingering question about the influence that large platform companies can have when they dominate a specific domain.
This dissertation examines these real estate platforms, and how they shape and are shaped by their users’ understandings of the platform and the information it provides. I argue that to understand the impact of a large platform company, we must study how it is used in practice and how it fits into the larger social and political context (in this case the context of urban planning and housing policy in the U.S.).
