Sin Yee Koh

The globalisation of real estate: the politics and practice of foreign real estate investment

Foreign investment in residential real estate – especially by new middle-class and super-rich investors – is re-emerging as a key political issue in academic, policy and public debates. On the one hand, global real estate has become an asset class for foreign individual and institutional investors seeking to diversify their investment portfolios. On the other, a suite of intergenerational migration and education plans may also be motivating foreign investors. Government and public responses to the latest manifestation of global real estate investment have taken different forms. These range from pro-foreign investment, primarily justified on geopolitical economic grounds, to anti-foreign investment for reasons such as mitigating public dissent and protecting the local housing market. Within this changing global context, the six articles in this special issue on the globalisation of real estate present a diverse range of empirical case studies from Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Australia and Korea. This editorial highlights four methodological challenges that the articles collectively highlight; they are (1) investor cohorts and property types, (2) regulatory settings, (3) geopolitics and (4) spatial differences and temporal trajectories.

Enabling, structuring and creating elite transnational lifestyles: intermediaries of the super-rich and the elite mobilities industry

ABSTRACT This article considers how the migration industries lens can be usefully employed in understanding how professional intermediaries enable, structure, and create transnational migration lifestyles of the super-rich. In particular, we examine how intermediaries and their services (1) enable the continued sustenance of transnational migration lifestyles for this group of elites; and (2) structure and create elite transnational lifestyles. This article primarily draws on interviews with professional intermediaries who service the super-rich, and content analysis of their websites and brochures. Inspired by insights from the new mobilities paradigm (and in particular the politics of mobility), we argue for an expanded conceptualisation of the migration industries beyond the literature’s current focus on labour recruitment and migration management. Specifically, we suggest thinking of the migration industries as a collection of actors and services that enable, structure, and create different types of ‘migrants’, their spaces and their highly uneven transnational mobilities – including that of the super-rich and their elite transnational lifestyles. We conclude with suggestions for a research agenda that may help to better understand the role of intermediaries in the creation of differentiated mobilities.

Tycoon City: Political Economy, Real Estate and the Super-Rich in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is highly unequal. In this chapter, we first show that wealth and inequality are structured by a political economy centring on small government and real estate profits. The underlying urban development model contains urbanisation, while restricting access to land to a small group that is fabulously rich. Next, we discern three reasons for the initial acceptance of this political economy: a mixed coalition reached sustained agreement on core policies; an ideology ‘sold’ these policies to the larger public; and social welfare policies redistributed benefits. Third, we argue that this support has now disappeared, because the government has been reluctant to face the consequences of domestic and foreign real estate investments for the non-rich. Unfortunately, a new social contract seems out of reach in the current political climate.

Temporalities of citizenship: Malaysian-Chinese skilled migrants in Singapore and returnees to Malaysia

This article examines the temporalities of citizenship – how the meanings and significance of citizenship change with time – through the cases of Malaysian-Chinese skilled migrants in Singapore and returnees to Malaysia. Drawing from the narratives of five respondents, this paper focuses on how the subjective, emotional, and rational understandings they ascribe to their citizenship(s) shift and change with time during their stays in Singapore or after their return to Malaysia. This article concludes by arguing that citizenship needs to be theorized and contextualized to time by simultaneously paying attention to firstly, the individual life course, and secondly, citizenship constitutions at the national scale.

Hyper-Divided Cities and the ‘Immoral’ Super-Rich: Five Parting Questions

This chapter summarises common themes covered in this volume and highlights areas for further empirical investigation. It is argued that there is a tendency to blame the ‘immoral’ super-rich for the dramatic growth of urban inequalities and the related hyper-division of cities. It is suggested that this accusatory reading should be complemented by empirical research into the precise involvement of the super-rich vis-a-vis other drivers. With this objective in mind, we pose five key questions: What is new about current forms of hyper-division and wealth inequality? What are the roles of structures and intermediaries, in addition to the super-rich? How are governments and their policies implicated? What about transformed urban economies in the context of the financialisation–urbanisation nexus? Are there geographical variations regarding cities and the super-rich?

In Search of the Super-Rich: Who Are They? Where Are They?

Cities, and particularly the leading world cities, are the sites where extreme inequalities find their most visible contemporary expression. They are, it seems, both the playgrounds and projects of a new overclass of super-rich. This introductory chapter sets out some of the conceptual key issues around these assumptions as a precursor to the more detailed discussions which follow. The chapter focuses on three questions: How do we construct this category of “super-rich”? Where do we find them? Where do cities and urban development fit into the picture? The final section of the chapter provides a brief guide to the structure and logic of the book.

A Culture of Migration

This chapter outlines the historical and current states of migration in the Malay(si)an context from the early twentieth century to the present. It argues for the normalcy of migration in Malaysia. This chapter first provides an overview of Malaysia’s internal migration and emigration (especially education-migration and post-study settlement in destination countries). It then analyses Malaysian migration to Singapore and the UK in relation to migration and citizenship policy changes in these destination countries. Next, it details two migration pathways that are popular amongst mobile Malaysians: education-migration, and education followed by work and settlement. This chapter concludes with a descriptive overview of mobile Malaysians’ culture of migration. Two themes are highlighted: migration is normal, and the presence of a kind of migration mentality.