1 Introduction

Since the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, the landscape of housing in Athens went through a series of transformations, resulting in the violent aggravation of housing conditions and a widespread inaccessibility to affordable housing for continuously growing parts of the urban population. In 2018, 39,5% of households in Greece were spending more than 40% of their income towards covering housing costs, while the relevant average rate in the EU was 9,6% (Eurostat, 2018). In 2022, in the region of Attica, 76% of tenants, after covering housing costs, had to either limit other essential expenses or rely on financial support from third parties (Eteron, 2022a, b, c). Moreover, 76,9% of young people (18 to 34) are hosted by their parents (Eurostat, 2021a, b), while the population of homeless people has increased (Kourachanis, 2019). Finally, rent prices in central Athenian districts have raised by 20%—30% from 2019 to 2021 (Eteron 2022b) and property prices in Athens have also been rapidly increasing from 2018 onwards (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Source: The National Bank of Greece (processed by the authors)

Shifts in property prices in Athens (2007 = 100).

Full size image

Since the early 2010s, three distinct, yet interrelated processes have underplayed a crucial role in the transformation of the housing landscape in Athens: i) the translation of the economic crisis into a housing one, manifested through indebted households and red loans, evictions, energy poverty and the reduction of homeownership rates (Housing Chatzikonstantinou & Vatavali, 2016; Europe, 2014; Sapounakis & Katapidi, 2017), ii) the change in the touristic identity of Athens from an one-day-stop to a year-round city break destination (see Fig. 2), resulting to the touristification of central Athenian districts (Pettas et al., 2021) and iii) the unprecedented involvement of international investors and funds, as evidenced by the increase of ‘non-residents direct investment in real estate’ from 153,1 m. Euro in 2015 to 1.449,5 m. Euro in 2019 (Bank of Greece, 2021). Indicatively, Athens ranked 2nd in Europe concerning the fastest amortization of real estate investment, as it takes just 17.66 years for the original investment to be amortized (Kathimerini, 2022).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Source: The National Bank of Greece (processed by the authors)

Overnight stays in touristic accommodation facilities in central Athens.

Full size image

In this context, both academic and public debates, up to various degrees, relate the total of the aforementioned developments with the rapid expansion of digitally mediated short-term rentals (STRs) in central Athens. According to Balampanidis et al., (2019), in the first stage of their emergence, STRs operated as a survival strategy for parts of urban population towards covering living and housing costs. However, the STR market was rapidly taken over by ‘corporate hosts’ (Cocola-Gant et al., 2021), namely investors and managerial companies, undermining its role as a means to supplementary income for vulnerable households. Moreover, high densities of STRs are recorded in central Athenian districts located in proximity to sites of tourist interest (Balampanidis et al., 2021), operating as an infrastructure for tourist accommodation in areas that hosted limited ‘conventional’ touristic units. It is mentioned that from 2014 to 2022, approximately 33.900 housing units (the absolute numbers of listings per year are presented in Table 1) have been made available on the Airbnb platform at least one time (AirDNA).

Table 1 Total Airbnb listings in Athens (2013–2021).
Full size table

STRs are playing a pivotal role in processes of touristification and displacement, affecting the aforementioned districts’ everyday life and rhythms, population composition, economic, social and political landscapes (Pettas et al., 2021). Moreover, Alexandri (2022), in the frame of a detailed analysis of processes of financialisation of the housing stock in Athens, identifies STRs as an important part of foreign and domestic investors’ strategies, often supported by state policies that incentivize investors. Finally, the role of STRs in rental prices and the inaccessibility to affordable housing, as well as processes of touristification is considered key in the narratives and repertoires of social movements.

In this paper, we bring out and interrelate the role of STRs in the commodification and financialisation of housing and the unfolding of touristification processes in central Athens. We delineate the aforementioned developments as a series of successive waves, arguing that the STR market initially eased the commodification of housing through its disassociation from the sphere of households’ social reproduction and its assetisation, facilitating the consequent engagement of domestic and foreign investors and the association of the Athenian housing landscape with financial flows. Moreover, the aforementioned developments underplayed a pivotal role in the touristification of central Athenian districts, creating “consumption bubbles”, exclusively addressed to tourists, while accounting for an ambiguous “regeneration” of the housing stock. Our main argument is that the aforementioned processes account for the substantial shift of part of Athens’ housing stock from personal consumption property and the conventional rental market to a new kind of asset/commercial property through the attachment of additional rents to dwellings, also expressed in the form of differential rent. This trend was accelerated by context-specific conditions, namely the implications of the crisis and the particularities of the Athenian housing landscape, such as the high rates of homeownershipFootnote 1 and the key role of families in housing provision. Although the analysis of the paper is focused on the city of Athens, linking the development of STR with wider processes of the city and the turbulent times of economic recession, similar processes can be found in other European cities and beyond. Our focus is on the ways that the expansion of digital platforms in STR has sparked processes of housing commodification and financialisation that result in gentrification and touristification. Therefore, the paper offers the literature with some new concepts that can expand our understanding of the ways that platforms disrupt and commodify housing contributing to a process of ‘unhoming’ (Spangler, 2019) and to indirect and direct displacement which includes the transformation of the identity of place and the uses of the neighborhood.

2 The role of platform real estate and STRs in processes of commodification and financialisation of housing

For Dolata (2019), practices that fall under platform capitalism do not account for the creation of new economic sectors but, instead, they reorganise and re-regulate pre-existing economic activities, while generating economic value through the commodification of a series of social relations and resources. This trend is further enforced by the growing dominance of the logics and instruments of venture capital in the platform economy, also through the gradual establishment of relevant funds as major investors in the market (Langley & Leyshon, 2017). Concerning STRs, critical debates primarily focus on their role in the creation of rent gaps and the unfolding of gentrification and touristification processes (see Brousseau et al., 2015; Gay, 2016; Gurran & Phibbs, 2017; Lee, 2016; Müller et al., 2021; Pettas et al., 2021; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018). However, in parallel, several researchers have looked into the ways STRs are building upon the commercialization of both housing and broader urban landscapes and communities.

Kreiczer-Levy (2015) makes a distinction between personal consumption property and commercial property, arguing that platforms such as Airbnb create intermediate spaces that compromise the core operation of dwellings as ‘homes’ through their operation as hotel rooms. This blurry status also reflects in policy inaction, as it becomes difficult to distinguish between occasional homesharing and commercial operations (Grisdale, 2021). In the same vein, Sadowski (2019) argues that rentier platforms “in their attempt to activate value in and extract rents from what they deem to be unproductive or uncommodified assets, are performing their own version of voodoo economics updated for the digital age”, while, besides the private spaces of homes, Törnberg (2022) argues that STRs also commercialise urban communities as wholes through “platform placemaking”. Dal Maso et al. (2019), focusing on the case of Juwai, a platform that connects real estate agents with Asian buyers, argue that relevant platforms through their capacity to connect remote actors and bridge cultural asymmetries within the digital sphere, capitalize and extract value building on “the different cultural practices, colloquialisms, traditions, languages and social norms of the user groups”. According to Braesemann and Baum (2020), business models that operate in the Property Technology (PropTech) market use the data to create Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) of high accuracy and high value on themselves, while contributing to the transformation of real estate into a data-driven market. Moreover, value extraction also derives from the commodification of previously non-marketed goods (Dobusch, 2019). In the case of STRs, this leads to broadening the reach of capital logic to parts of housing stock that, until recently, was associated with the sphere of social reproduction.

Nevertheless, while the aforementioned works have looked into the ways platforms in general and, STRs in specific, contribute to housing commercialization and assetization, their role in financialisation processes has rarely been explored, especially through a focus on the increasing influence of investors in the STR market and the association of the latter with global circuits of capital. Clalncy (2020), along with Cocola-Gant and Gago (2021), associate STR-driven financialization with the introduction of new actors, more particularly investors who, through by-to-let practices, remove properties from the conventional rental market in order to benefit from the rent gap between the traditional and the short-term rental markets. In the same vein, Gurran and Shrestha (2021) argue that STRs challenge conventional understandings of home and home-making by introducing new stakeholders beyond households, while they enable financialization through increasing the demand for ‘housing as investment’. Especially in countries which, following the implications of the 2008 financial crisis (e.g., Portugal and Greece), turned to tourism as a solution, ideal conditions for the engagement of small and medium investors but also managerial companies and large, international investors were created by central and local governments, while the professionalization of the market enabled opportunities for the financialization of housing through the “the allocation of interest-bearing capital in tourism-oriented real estate” (see Jover & Cocola-Gant, 2022). For Grisdale (2021), STRs represent a new type of housing financialization, as relevant platforms constitute rental housing providers who promote “individualized forms of homeownership, while also enabling the financialization of those purpose-built rentals that already exist”. Sadowski (2020) associates STRs with the broader “rentier capitalism” landscape, arguing that the former emerge as crucial intermediaries that both control access over dwellings and collect rents for their use. Furthermore, real estate platforms enable the “digital polyplatform rentierism” (Gil et al., 2023), a fluid and hybrid condition of dwellings, characterized by the flexibility on behalf of owners to offer a dwelling in differentiated terms (long, medium or short term), constantly adopting to existing opportunities for rent extraction, while this condition “amplifies the exchange value of housing and the owners’ future profit expectations, enhancing the opportunities and means for the financialization of housing”. In South European cities (see Amore et al., 2020 for the cases of Athens, Lisbon and Milan), STRs, through their establishment as major actors in urban tourism, resulted to the displacement of residents through the creation of rent gaps.

Aalbers (2017:3), recognizing its multileveled and cross-sectoral influence, frames financialisation as the “increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households”. In this context, commodification/ assetization and financialisation are two distinct, yet intertwined processes. Ward and Swyngedouw (2018) argue that assetization is a principal component of financialisation, while, for Rogers et al. (2018)“the idea of commodified housing is focused on the dwelling as a repository for storing and growing capital, while the financialisation of housing has a slightly different emphasis, focusing on actors (bankers, financiers, mortgage brokers, rentiers) and organisations (financial institutions, banks, institutional landlords) as mechanisms for capital accumulation, rather than on dwellings per se”.

In this paper, we argue that the STR market creates added value to dwellings – also through socio-cultural shifts that eased housing commodification – which i) are expressed in rent gaps through incentivizing homeowners to both place their properties in the STR market and demand rents in the long-term rental market that are compared to their estimated, speculative profits from STR-related activities and ii) created favourable conditions for the introduction of financial actors, logics and instruments in the Athenian housing landscape. According to Purcell et al. (2019:10), “the novelty of financialisation – when mediated by financial products that permit the hands-off ownership of land, resources and infrastructures – may well lie in the penetration of rent extraction mechanisms into new spheres of social reproduction and everyday life”. In an attempt to understand how the STR market enables the creation of new rents and the ways the latter translate to rent extraction mechanisms, we first look into the processes of commodification and the transformation of part of housing stock from consumption to commercial property through relevant socio-cultural shifts.

Ward and Aalbers (2016:1763) distinguish between two categories of differential rent, namely “DR1, also known as ‘extensive rent’, being due to increased productivity attributable to an existing feature of the land; and DR2, also known as ‘intensive rent’, being due to increased productivity attributable to investment upon that land”. In the analysis that follows, we delineate the specific attributes of these two subcategories of differential rent in the STR market. DR1 is related with the location of dwellings, mostly related with proximity to ‘traditional’ touristic areas of Athens and public transport infrastructure. Moreover, in the case of STRs, DR1 is also associated with the construction of narratives around Athens in total and specific districts in particular, which are disseminated through the STR platforms and built upon local socio-cultural landscapes. DR2 relates with i) direct investments to dwellings through renovations, ii) the labour involved in the everyday management of the listings, both online and on site, iii) the association of short-term accommodation with other aspects of the urban life through affiliate marketing practices that, overall create a digitally-mediated urban experience through the entanglement of accommodation with everyday consumption, activities, social reproduction etc.

3 Methodology

In order to explore the role of STRs in processes of commodification, financialisation and gentrification, we focus on the Airbnb platform and we build on a mixed-method research, comprised of 21 semi-structured interviews, along with quantitative and cartographic data produced through the processing of relevant databases from the AirDNA platform for the period 2014–2021. The interviews were conducted from January 2021 to February 2022 and involved hosts who also own the properties made available for STR (11), professional managers who are hired by owners to operate as hosts (7) and employees in managerial and real estate companies (3). It is mentioned that professional managers comprised of young (25–35), highly skilled (the total of participants was holding a bachelor or masters degree and was fluent in at least one foreign language. Owners interviewed for this study varied from people who were providing a room in their permanent residence to professionals who bought or rented whole building and made them available for STR. Property owners were approached through the Airbnb platform, while ‘peripheral’ actors were identified through snowball techniques. It is also mentioned that due to the fact that during this period the COVID19 pandemic was in full development, the interviews were conducted online, through the Zoom platform, towards protecting all participants. All interviewees signed relevant consent forms, while the interviews were recorded by the authors and transcribed by an external service provider. Concerning quantitative and cartographic data presented in this paper, they are all deriving from the AirDNA database. The database comprised of raw data concerning the total of Airbnb listings in the Municipality of Athens from 2014 to 2021 and all processing took place by the authors.

4 Airbnb-mediated commodification, financialisation and gentrification in Athens

4.1 Cultural shifts: Airbnbing as a side hustle

Likewise Couchsurfing, Airbnb in Athens grew as an alternative form of tourism outside of the traditional hospitality sector. Perceived initially as a rather cultural practice whose main motivations were the exchange, the social interaction and the exploration of a destination ‘like a local’, STRs became a prevalent mode of affordable mobility among young people. That said, the people involved into this form of amateur hospitality business were coming from urban middle-class backgrounds. Inspired by the prevalent cosmopolitanism of this era which was facilitated by airlines like Easy Jet, Ryannair and platforms like Couchsurfing, they saw Airbnb as a habit of the european cosmopolitan middle classes. Cultural exchange and experimentation were among their drives as at that time pocket money was not at the top of their priorities:

“At first, I didn’t need to Airbnb for the money. I was in it because I was a couchsurfer, as I told you, I liked it. I had listed my second room as well to host foreign students from my institution” (Maria, host/ owner of a single apartment).

During the early days of Couchsurfing and Airbnb, flatsharing was an almost unheard concept in a context that followed entirely the ‘southern’ housing model. In fact, around that time (2008–2012) Athens had high percentages of home ownership, combined with very limited housing rent subsidies. Historically, extended Greek families played a crucial role in supporting access to home ownership (Kourachanis, 2016) while maintaining strong influence over their children’s lives (Pettas et al., 2022). The lack of youth policies exarcebates this long standing pattern, reproducing a rather old fashioned mode of control over young people’s lifes. Since the majority of young people live in their parents’ home for years into their adulthood, renting a flat while studying was perceived as a redundant expense for the family budget.

Therefore, during this very first wave of the Airbnb expansion, STRs facilitated besides cultural exchange and experimentation, the economic independence and emancipation of younger generations who were attracted by a cosmopolitan, bohemian lifestyle that had as its foundation an emerging form of urban tourism:

“I had airbnb as a side hustle. It was a way for me to have everything paid by Airbnb visitors. I went traveling abroad with the money I was saving” (Katerina, host/ owner of a single apartment).

Likewise, another interviewee mentioned that “Airbnb was, foremost, a way to make money and be independent as a university student”. During this first wave of Airbnb, the intimate atmosphere of Couchsurfing eased the transition towards a more formalised platform that offered monetary rewards to hosts while facilitating common lifestyle and consumption patterns. It was not uncommon at that time for hosts to explicitly state their personal interests in their listed flat descriptions or even mention their own specific requests from travelers such as ‘being open—minded’, ‘LGBTQ—friendly’ or even ‘interested in arts and culture’. That way, Airbnb was maintaining the intimacy of sharing your flat while also living in it. That time, listed houses maintained the homey atmosphere as hosts. On top of that, hosts were willing to engage with visitors beyond the mere provision of curated lists for surrounding bars and restaurants. Those who listed their rooms in Airbnb were the ones embracing a cosmopolitan way of living:

“The initial idea came to me when I traveled to New York in 2012. I stayed in a room not in a hotel or a flat on my own. [...] then I met a couple in Boston, they were airbnbing and that allowed them to travel the world with little money and to open their own restaurant. This is how I was inspired to start doing it” (Kostas, host/ owner of four AirBnB apartments).

Likewise, another interviewee mentions his airbnb experiences in Berlin, Barcelona, and Istanbul stating that back then when he first started renting his room was not that popular “to open up your house to strangers”. Indeed, during the first era of STRs in Athens visitors were considered more of intimate travelers, charmed by the everyday life of Athens.

Alkistis, an artist and photographer, started listing one of her rooms at Airbnb quite early on. As she told us, that way she had some of her basic expenses covered so she could focus entirely into her artistic career. It was important for her to feel at home and not like running a bed and breakfast, so she kept her belongings inside the house:

“At the beginning, because demand was limited, I was staying in the flat. I had both options open: sharing or providing the entire home. When I was renting it all, I was staying elsewhere but all of my stuff was there. My main bookcase is still there in those houses” (Alkistis, host/ owner of a single apartment)

As described above, the first wave of STRs marks the entering of Athens into the new global era, incorporating practices that were already popular in Western cities. Airbnb hosting allowed young people mostly coming from middle class backgrounds and well-educated to earn pocket money to travel the world. In this sense, it can be argued that hosts were even displaying values associated with neo-bohemia (Lloyd, 2010) and anti-consumerism as their motivations went beyond making mere profit. Airbnbing was a facilitator of young people’s lifestyles who strived for independence and autonomy. Homesharing was acting indeed as a way to put money into the pockets of middle-class students and those in intermittent employment. Airbnbing was more of a side hustle, less an entrepreneurial endeavor that hosts had expectations to be paid off. Flats were maintaining the homey atmosphere with zero modifications from hosts’ side.

4.2 From ‘home-sharers’ to entrepreneurs

In the early 2010’s, as the implications of the economic crisis in Greece intensified, resulting in high levels of unemployment (especially among young people), cuts in salaries and pensions and the withdrawal of welfare state provisions, struggling households turned to STRs in order to cope with increasing housing and everyday life costs. It is reported that around that time the ‘international migration of professionals’ from Greece was increased with those who hold a masters or a PhD degree leaving the country for better professional prospects (Labrianidis, 2014). Moreover, according to Labrianidis and Pratsinakis (2016), ‘the total emigration outflow of Greeks from 2010 until the end of 2015 ranges between 280,000 and 350,000 people’, while 75% of those hold a university degree. Those who left behind were pushed to enter the labour market through part-time jobs and flexible forms of employment or even shadow work that most of the times paid the bills but was irrelevant to their studies.

The key role of extended families as main providers of housing continued within this trend, undertaking however a differentiated character. While young people could not cover housing costs associated with home-ownership, family properties were employed towards creating additional income that could either complement the low salaries of the early crisis period or constitute their sole source of income.

“I was looking for alternative sources of income in order to maintain an apartment that I inherited from my parents. The apartment is quite big, I had to pay a lot of taxes, so listing it on Airbnb it was a way to keep it under my possession and deal with running costs” (Giorgos, host/ owner of a single apartment)

“The first house was her grandparents’ home. The other was left to her by her parents, it was a small one in Metaxourgeio. The third one was also hers, she used to live there but she moved out, renovated it and listed it on Airbnb” (Alexandra, host/ professional manager)

In this way, the commodification of housing stock firstly emerged as part of households’ survival strategies (see also Balampanidis et al., 2019), building on the high rates of homeownership and the increased demand for touristic accommodation due to the gradual establishment of Athens as a year-round, city break destination (see Pettas et al., 2021). In these early stages, the total of mobilised resources also derived from family networks, including labour (for minor renovations, cleaning, online and in-person communication with visitors) and materials, such as furniture and electric devices. Within family-run listings, the commodification of housing was often expressed by participants as a mode of alienation from their home:

“I never placed something on the walls, I never got something extra that I would like to have in the apartment. I kept things simple, so I could save space and I could tide up the house quickly. As a result, I didn’t like my apartment anymore [..] The place didn’t have a distinct character anymore, it could belong to anyone, I couldn’t see myself in there […] Also, I couldn’t use it the way I wanted, I couldn’t call friends over for a drink. It only happened 3 or 4 times in 3 years” (Maria, host/ owner of a single apartment)

At the same time, the aforementioned practice expanded through additional mechanisms. People with no access to dwellings through family networks, along with those who wanted to expand their listings, moved on to renting dwellings through conventional, long-term contracts and then listing them on Airbnb, often without informing the owners. Gradually, alongside small owners, utilizing properties that were in their procession in advance, wealthy households – also taking advantage of the substantial fall in property prices in the mid-2010’s—started investing in properties that could be introduced to the STR market.

“How did we (the family) get into it? We had some money on the side, we didn’t want to just keep it in the bank, also because it was a period of insecurity, so what can one do with that money? You will buy property. We had homes to live in, we had a country house, so we weren’t interested in something that would cover our private needs. We had some specific districts in mind and we started looking for properties there. Ok, it was this period that everything in the city centre was turning into an Airbnb” (Andreas, host/ owner of three AirBnB apartments)

We argue that the gradual predominance of ‘Airbnb amateur entrepreneurs’ over homesharers was accompanied by crucial cultural shifts that eased commodification, concerning both the role of dwellings in households’ social reproduction and the incorporation of homesharing platforms in personal and household strategies. As for the latter, monetizing on property was brought up as the major expectation on behalf of hosts, while the overall Airbnb practice was further shifted away from Couchsurfing logics. Alkistis who started quite early to Airbnb one of her rooms and then her whole appartment captures this shift:

“There can be no comparison between 2012, 2013 and today. It used to be a very friendly and peer-to-peer logic. Neither the visitors had high expectations, nor the host was feeling obliged to serve them. Now we have to do with rooms-to-let, the whole logic behind it has been hijacked” (Alkistis, host/ owner of a single apartment)

Kostas who initially started to Airbnb as a practice that reflected his middle class background and mode of urban tourism he was involved in, narrates how what started out of amateurism became professionalised:

“Maybe in other cases hosts and visitors have become friends but this is not the case for me. I consider this relationship as strictly professional” (Kostas, host/ owner of four AirBnB apartments)

The aforementioned developments account for the shift of part of housing stock from personal consumption to commercial property. STR listings enabled both households struggling with increasing housing and living costs and the emerging ‘Airbnb entrepreneurs’ to extract rents substantially higher than those that were expected in the conventional rental market, while also accounting for an occupation alternative for people who were unemployed or working part-time. In this stage, the extraction of intensive rent was enabled by labour and resources invested in dwellings in the form of renovations and engagement in the everyday obligations that were necessary (communication, cleaning, shopping etc.), mostly through DIY practices on behalf of the hosts/owners and their extended interpersonal and family networks. At the same time, this turn signifies the end of non-for-profit, peer-to-peer homesharing practices, as actors of different backgrounds and expectations tried to capitalise on their properties.

4.3 Multi-listings, professionalization and processes of financialisation

The processes described earlier that, overall, account for the STR-driven commodification of housing, mostly comprise of fragmented, individual practices on behalf of small and medium actors of the market. In these cases, even concerning wealthy households, the activity undertook semi-professional attributes, as investment portfolios were quite limited in terms of number of properties, while the everyday operations were mostly undertaken by family members. Nevertheless, as discussed in this part, commodification was followed by the engagement of different sets of actors, such as companies, individual investors and funds, both international and domestic. First, companies, with different mixes of ownership/ renting in their portfolios undertook the management of large numbers of dwellings, while expanding and upgrading the services provided. Second, those companies’ successful operation, alongside with the opening of local actors to international financial and investment circuits that was also supported by state policies such as the Golden Visa program, paved the way for the financialisation of Athenian housing stock.

This rapid professionalization of the STR market was largely enabled by the inaction on behalf of both the state and the municipality of Athens concerning its regulation. Within the outline of the constrained capacities and power of local governments to plan and implement urban policies and regulations, the operation of the STR market in Greece falls under a country-wide regulation (L. 4472/ 2017). According to existing regulation, practices that involve the short-term renting of furnished housing units and individual rooms fall under the sharing economy and, thus, exempt from VAT. Nevertheless, if additional services are provided, the renting out is considered a business activity and is subjected to VAT. At the same time, the owners have to report their units in a national registry, unless the latter are made available for less than 90 days per year. The profits from STR-related activities are taxed in the same way as those in the conventional rental market (varying from 15% for turnover up to 12.000 Euros per year to 45% for turnover beyond 35.000 Euros per year). Building on the above, the lack of regulations and policies that would deter the business-oriented and for-profit character of STR-related activities played a crucial role in the commercialization and financialisation of the housing stock.

As highlighted before, the third wave of STR development in Athens is marked by the introduction of companies that have a large number of apartments in their portfolios that result in multilistings in STRs. These companies enter the newly developed STR market as they see a sound new market opportunity from a range of activities, like managing properties, offering hosting and cleaning services etc. At the same time, they account for the rapid professionalization of the market as, since 2013, the share of the market of actors with 5 or more listings rose from 15% in 2013 to 31% in 2020, mostly in expense of small owners (Table 2), while the share of those that hold more than 2 properties (43%) exceeds the share of those that hold one property (42%) in 2018. By this distinction, we anticipate the renting out of one property as a more amateur activity, closer to the initial logic of the sharing economy. On the other hand, the renting out of more than2 properties by a single owner/ manager, may the latter be an individual person or a company, consists a professional activity, especially concerning actors who manage more than 5 housing units.

Table 2 Shares in the STR market according to number of listings per owner.
Full size table

Concerning domestic actors, these companies were stemming either from the pool of Airbnb amateur entrepreneurs of the second wave, or from real estate enterprises that saw opportunities in the STR market. The increasing shares of professional actors is related to their high levels of competitiveness in the market through their capacity to both create scale economies and, thus, substantially reduce costs and provide services of higher level, a fact that is directly reflected to the algorithmic evaluation of the listings and the subsequent, disproportionate distribution of rewards and opportunities on behalf of the platform, as expressed for example by the higher rates of ‘super host’ statuses among listings that are part of professional actors’ portfolios (see Table 3).

Table 3 Percentages of super-host statuses.
Full size table

Additionally, over time performance of professionalized listing in terms of average daily rate, average annual revenue and average number of bookings (see Table 4) demonstrates the pressure put upon non-professional actors and the overall professionalization of the STR market. Within the period 2013 – 2021, unlike owners of a single property and also owners of up to five propertiesv(whose relevant rates dropped or remained relevatily stable), professional actors have experienced a substantial increase in average annual revenue and average number of bookings.

Table 4 Average daily rates, annual revenues and annual number of bookings in Athens.
Full size table

Among them, particular companies stand out, such as Mint with 241 listings and Homm with 306 listings. Private persons and managerial companies maintain portfolios of both privately owned dwellings and dwellings that are ceded to them by the owners. In the latter case, the companies deduct 10–30% of the profits, depending on the overall services they provide, while they often take over dwellings’ renovation in order to render them more competitive in the market. Concerning amateur entrepreneurs of the second wave, a number of our interviewees started with having a single apartment in the platform and while they were making good profits from that, they went even further, starting renting a couple of more apartments, renovating them and putting them in the STR market. From amateur entrepreneurs with one listing they were gradually transformed into business owners of multiple apartments.

“I was renting one room out of the three I had. I had two toilets etc, I started it completely randomly, just for fun. And then it almost became a business, which stopped with the pandemic. I ended up having 18 houses […] we were renting apartments under my name, or my brothers’ or my mothers’ and placing them on Airbnb. Then I acquired a space for washing machines and dryers for 18 houses, you understand” (Vasilis, host/ manager of multiple AirBnB apartmnets).

Apart from those domestic organic STR entrepreneurs with multiple listings, the STR market also saw the emergence of actors who either provided consultancy to international investors or were directly engaged in transactions by selling properties – that had been active in the STR market – as investment opportunities. A host that we interviewed stated that he is an architect and through his involvement in STRs as a host he has met several investors that later on became his clients, assisting them in finding a market opportunity, renovating the apartment and offering tips on how to get good reviews on the platform. The STR market is gradually augmented by all these new actors and by 2017–2018 housing becomes a commodity and is offered as an investment opportunity rather than property:

“At some point we get two more (apartments), which we renovate with the prospect of selling them as well, and in between we put them on Airbnb to start writing in, to gain some reviews for someone to come in, to be sold as an investment later […] 4 out of 5 (sales) have been made through a company, which deals with Airbnb and at the same time sells for golden visa […] 4 of these 5 apartments were sold to golden visa investors” (Nikos, host/ owner and broker)

For this interviewee, many good reviews for a listed apartment in the platform, can raise the price of the apartment in order to be sold later to an investor. In that way the STR platform is the medium of an added value creation. The platform generates a new exchange value for the apartment, on top of the usual exchange value in the conventional real estate market. Then, the international investors saw opportunities in the real estate market of Athens, as compared to other European capitals the prices were relatively low. An interviewee highlighted:

“that is, I remember a broker, telling me that he had a client- an Italian woman- who was coming in and had bought 35 pieces... 35 apartments. And when she wanted to go shopping (for apartments), she saw that the square meter was sold for 1000€ around the Acropolis and for 600 in Koukaki below…she was buying by storm” (Eleni, host/ professional manager)

Another interviewee stated that one element that boosted housing commodification, and to an extent housing financialisation in Athens, is the introduction of the Golden Visa initiative by the Greek State in 2014. In order to get a Golden Visa for you and your family, one had to buy properties that -in total- are worth at least 250.000 euro. Many foreigners saw that as an investment opportunity and by the end of 2021, 9619 investors, mostly originating from China (66%), Turkey (6%) and Russia (5%) had been granted the Visa (Eteron, 2022a, b, c), through buying flats, or even whole complexes of flats, mostly in central neighborhoods of Athens. That resulted in higher prices in the real estate market in a period where the Greek economy was still struggling after the prolonged recession that started in 2009/2010. Groups of international investors landed in Athens with huge expectations:

“We are also convinced to sell the two apartments in Koukaki since the price we can get is very high, we actually see that if we sell them tomorrow, the profit we will get will be like waiting to work on the apartments for about ten years… so we say let's sell them now, …. the romance of the case is completely gone too, let's go find some others, to do this work” (Kyriakos, broker, former host/ owner)

Finally, besides individual investors, the STR market operated as a gateway for international circuits of investment funds. An employee in STR company, formed by Chinese entrepreneurs with a prolonged presence in Athens describes their operation:

“The owner and his family are Chinese and have clothing stores in Athens for many years, as well as a Chinese restaurant. Since his operations were successful and he had proven himself as a businessman, he had gained the right to ask for support for larger scale investments from China. And he developed this business plan, building on the fact that properties were still cheap, to buy apartments, renovate them and list them on Airbnb […] I joined the company in 2015 when they had been active for 6 months and they had 15 apartments. When I left, in September 2017 they had approximately 100 […] The investors would show up once every 2 months. We bought a Mercedes van that was only used to pick them up from the airport. They would come, stay for a few days and check the numbers. And, since we were doing well, my boss started to propose larger projects related to real estate” (Stefanos, employee in a STR managerial company)

All in all, the STR market accounts for both direct and indirect financialisation processes. The first include the direct purchase of apartments on behalf of both individual investors and funds, towards listing them on STR platforms. Concerning individual actors, the Golden Visa policy played a crucial role in accelerating relevant trends. Moreover, platform/algorithmic STRs also operated as a rent creation mechanism generating a new market besides the usual real estate market of long-term leasing, where the value is driven by numerous ratings, concerning in-house services, locations, distances to tourist sites, the symbolic capital of neighboorhoods etc. Additionally, the STR market accounts for indirect financialisation by creating rent gaps that express the difference in expected rents from listing the dwellings in relevant platforms compared to the ones that could be extracted in the conventional long-time rental market. In this vein, finance and entrepreneurship logics and mechanics were introduced in the production and management of housing properties, while the mission of housing as the ground for social reproduction is completely lost.

5 Geographical dimensions: STRs, touristification and displacement

Drawing on the expansion of STRs in central Athens, we understand the geographical distribution of the activity over the last decade as a series of successive waves, having as a starting point the established tourist districts and landmarks and gradually expanding to residential areas. In the early stages of the development of the STR market (2014), high densities of listings were noticed in traditional touristic districts such as Syntagma, Monastiraki, Thissio, Acropolis and Psyrri with established tourist accommodation services and infrastructure, as well ashigher rents than the more residential districts of Athens (Fig. 3A). Subsequently, the flows of STRs expanded gradually in mere residential areas, such as Koukaki, Exarcheia, Pagkrati (Fig. 3B). These districts, characterised by mixed land uses that included recreational, cultural and entertainment activities and proximity to touristic landmarks, offered short-term residents access to “live-like-a-local’ experiences, while facilitating easy access to already established touristic hotspots. The dwellings that were converted to tourist accommodation concerned mostly apartments that were either owner-occupied or part of the conventional rental market prior to their introduction to the STR one. As the aforementioned districts were the first to experience a violent increase in tourists’ inflows and rent increases (see also Pettas et al., 2021), displaced tenants, mostly comprised of lower middle-class households, moved to nearby districts such as Kypseli, Victoria, Amerikis Square, in which large parts of the population comprised of migrants and non-skilled workers (Fig. 3C).

“Many residents had to leave because they couldn’t afford the rent prices. People living here for many years, had to move to closeby districts in which the rent prices are lower. Especially migrants, who were paying 250-300 Euros for rent had to move even further” (Eirini, host/ professional manager).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Source: AirDNA (processed by the authors)

Geographical distribution of Airbnb listings.

Full size image

However, in parallel, as the STR market continued to grow, the same districts were gradually brought up as further popular locations for STR-related activities. Main factors consist of their centrality and connectivity with the traditionally touristic areas through public transport, while the low prices of the housing stock, especially during the economic crisis, rendered these districts particularly attractive for investors.

“The reason we mostly invested around Victoria Square was that, during that period (2013-2015) the prices were significantly cheaper compared to other districts in the center of Athens” (Kostas, host/ owner of four AirBnB apartments)

As a result, central districts that used to host migrant and working-class populations are experiencing a two-fold pressure by the interrelated inflows of both tourists and lower middle-class Athenians who have been displaced from neighboring districts but, yet, compared to the pre-existing local residents, maintain a stronger position in the housing market. The aforementioned developments account for consecutive waves of touristification and gentrification, in which the STR market underplays a key role. Within these processes, migrant and refugee populations are perceived as a ‘threat’ for actors of the STR market:

“Concerning Victoria, the refugee crisis, in 2015 but also now has an impact on my business, because it’s different to have a square (e.g. Victoria Square) in which a tourist and his family can walk around, compared to having 200 people in tents with babies and children crying” (Leonidas, host/ owner of two AirBnB apartments)

At the same time, besides housing, land uses and commercial activities are rapidly transforming towards facilitating the needs of tourists, as well as new, middle-income residents, through the creation of consumption bubbles, mostly comprising of hype bars, cafes and restaurants that remain inaccessible for pre-existing populations, a development welcomed by actors of the STR market.

“Yes, it’s a good thing that, through Airbnb, tourism has expanded beyond Plaka, Monastiraki and Acropolis, it has moved to Kypseli, Victoria, so it helps these neighborhoods to have new businesses or existing businesses to increase their prices because the consuming power of a tourist is much higher than the one of a migrant” (Kostas, host/ owner of four AirBnB apartments)

Platformisation seems to undeprlay a crucial role also in facilitating and channeling consumption, further enabling touristification processes as, through affiliate marketing practices, accommodation and everyday consumption are controlled by STR actors.

“It concerns platforms that are connected with Google, TripAdvisor etc. and bring me together with businesses. I use the CRC (Chain Reaction Cycle) affiliate program and I can offer my visitors anything they ask for: taxis, tickets to archeological sites, bars, restaurants, doctors, massages, personal training, whatever [...] Of course, a key criterion for selecting businesses is my commission” (Spyros, host/ owner of company managing a whole building available for STR)

Finally, STR-related activities seem to only have limited contribution to local economies through the empowerment of small businesses. Instead, concerning actors from the whole spectrum of professionalization, necessary materials and equipment, from furniture and electronic devices to expendables necessary for the everyday operation of STRs are mostly purchased by big chains.

“We mostly buy stuff from IKEA: furniture, mattresses, cutlery etc. The main reason is that it’s cheaper. Apart from that, we tried to also construct things ourselves, for example through making a bookcase out of crates [...] For small things that I buy massively, such as honey, coffee, sugar, cleaning products etc. I will go to places that sell at bulk price and are outside the city center. I will only go to local stores in an emergency” (Elpida, host/ owner of three AirBnB apartments)

For a number of interviewees, the process of development of STRs in Athens from the second to the third wave destroyed the bohemian atmosphere of the sharing culture as the gradual professionalization of the field resulted in a uniform decoration of the apartments, a kind of IKEA lookalike decoration and a hotelisation of STRs. While until 2017–2018 some interviewees highlighted the fact that when they wanted to renovate an apartment they would be looking to buy furniture and other equipment locally, after the gradual involvement of STR companies they were all turned to multi-stores as a more affordable alternative.

Overall, STRs are accounting for the direct and indirect touristification of working class and migrant populated districts, through their expansion in districts such as Kypseli, Victoria and Amerikis Square and their prior role in the creation of inflows of displaced lower-middle class populations from districts that were touristified in earlier stages. Apart from the landscape of housing, STRs have a substantial impact on local economic activities, accounting for the creation of consumption bubbles addressed to short-term residents who can perform their economic superiority and the overall shift of local businesses towards facilitating their needs. Finally, local stores that could facilitate STRs needs concerning essential equipment and expendables are not benefiting, as hosts and companies are mostly working with big chains and large stores towards pushing down their running costs.

6 Conclusions

In this paper, building on the case of Athens, we contribute to broad debates on ‘platform real estate’ (Shaw, 2020) and ‘rentier capitalism’ (Christophers, 2020) through the exploration of the relation between platform-driven housing commodification and financialisation, facilitated through digitally mediated STRs and, more specifically, the Airbnb platform, while interrelating them with the unfolding of transnational gentrification processes. We understand STR-driven commodification as the dissociation of housing from the sphere of households’ social reproduction and its transformation into a commodity. Moreover, we argue that the aforementioned deterritorialization of large parts of the housing stock operated as a gateway for international and domestic investors and funds, enabling the ‘opening up’ of Athens’ housing landscape to international flows of capital. In this process, STR hosts often operate as intermediary investors (Guironnet et al., 2016), putting their place-specific knowledge and skills acquired through their engagement with the STR market in use towards facilitating the involvement of international investors in the Athenian housing market. Through this paper we contribute to the limited literature concerning the role of STRs in housing commodification and fianancialisation. Moreover, the case of Athens exemplifies the negative impacts of the STR market upon housing in the absence of relevant regulations and policies that would both prevent the transformation of the landscape of the sharing economy into a privileged terrain for financial actors, logics and tools and support access to affordable housing for residents who are struggling with the aforementioned externalities. Additionally, the Athenian case demonstrates the key role of specific attributes of the housing context (i.e. high rates of homeownership, strong role of family networks as housing providers) in the first stages of the unfolding of touristification processes, creating the conditions for the introduction of investors and managerial companies.

In more details, the above interrelated processes unfolded in three consecutive waves, where the first wave is marked by the gradual introduction of STR platforms in Athens, that were mainly used by students and young professionals that saw homesharing as a new bohemian lifestyle component that could also generate pocket money. The commodification of property was seen through a second wave that signified the emergence of an Airbnb amateur entrepreneurs’ strata over homesharers, while the third wave introduced companies with multi-listings that drove the whole market into the pathways of extreme commodification and financialisation. These three consecutive waves resulted in gradual gentrification and touristification pushes, from the very central and touristy neighborhoods to the outskirts of the Athenian city center, bringing displacement for the working class and the very small businesses that could not afford the additional rents that STR created.

Overall, the STR market builds upon the attachment and activation of new kinds of rents through the creation of a novel mode of differential rent that does not exclusively derives from direct investments in dwellings in the form of renovations but also on the specific socio-economic relations enabled by platform capitalism and the comparative advantages of specific dwellings within processes of territorializing and diffusing touristic flows in the city. Subsequently, STR platforms, operate as middlegrounds (between owners and tourists, but also between investors and owners) that enable the extraction of what can be framed as a three-fold infrastructure rent: the property owners’ rights to access and use the platform’s digital infrastructure (see Srnicek, 2021), the rent-gap deriving from home unmaking, namely the shift of dwellings’ use through their re-placement from the physical space of households’ social reproduction to the touristic accommodation infrastructure and iii) the indirect use of urban infrastructure in a broad sense, including both physical one (e.g. public transport) and soft infrastructure in the form of socio-cultural landscapes. As such, digital and physical infrastructures are evolving in a mutual way of producing and extracting new kinds of rents from each other, and in particular intensive rent when it comes to the way investments are being made upon dwellings. Platforms can transform housing stock into assets to store capital and circulate it in the city. In this sense, the STR market materializes it’s potential to operate as gateways for financialization, fulfilling the three functions described by Fields and Rogers (2021), namely i) facilitating capital circulation and surplus capital absorption, ii) coordinating and securing capital turnover and iii) constituting real estate as a financial asset class. It is thus imperative for future research to provide answers to the ways platforms can increase the intensive rent of dwellings and in particular to the ways that intensive rent is produced through the interplay between algorithmic rankings and investments.