Real estate and global capital networks: drilling into the City of London

There is a growing awareness in urban social science of the importance of commercial real estate as a medium by which large cities are embedded within global capital networks. This trend is most pronounced in the office markets of international financial centres and has become more marked with increasing globalization of commercial real estate. Nuances of market processes can be lost in over-simplistic categorizations such as ‘international financial capital’ or ‘property developers’. Diversity in the nature of office investors leads to substantial differences in the motivations for building international portfolios and in impacts for the cities concerned. This chapter provides a detailed examination of the City of London office market, drawing on a unique database tracing office ownership over some 40 years. The changing tides of ownership, from predominantly local domestic to over 60 per cent non-UK owned in 2014, are linked to transformations of the City of London economy.