ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the power to treat landed property as a pure financial asset (to buy, sell and use land according to rent it yields). The authors identify five kinds of changes related to the locational behavior of firms, public intervention in land use and development, the identity and nature of landowners, the formation of rent and investment markets. The restructuring and globalization of economies and especially the concomitant changes in the financial system have had enormous effects on real estate markets. In recent discussion, these effects have so far remained almost completely neglected. This is unfortunate, because it may be argued that it is precisely real estate markets, which transmit the effects of general economic change on space. On the other hand, in the discussion of rent theory, the spatial consequences of economic transformation have been ignored.
