Pension funds occupy a highly specific but powerful position within current liberalized and globalized real estate markets. On the one hand, they collectively manage and administer retirement savings that individuals accumulate over the course of their working lives. This mandate assigns pension funds a heightened social responsibility to handle entrusted capital in a transparent and socially accountable manner. On the other hand, pension funds—like other institutional investors—pursue this mandate by allocating capital to asset classes promising stable and attractive returns. In recent decades, housing has become a main investment target for pension funds across the globe, given the stable and secure return on investment (Gabor & Kohl, 2022; Wijburg et al., 2018).

Consequently, in many national contexts, pension fund investments have become embedded in a self-reinforcing cycle of urban regeneration and densification. While these investments can support the physical upgrading of already built-up urban areas, they have also been linked to rising rents, social exclusion, and post-renovation gentrification (Aalbers et al., 2023; García-Lamarca, 2021). In extreme cases, this dynamic has resulted in residents being evicted or displaced as direct result of the investment strategies pursued by their own pension funds. These dynamics highlight the fundamental tension between the social mandate of pension funds and their role as powerful actors in financialized real estate markets.

This Special Issue is guided by two central hypotheses.

Pension funds operate in ways that are similar to, yet socially distinct from, other institutional investors: Although pension funds often behave like other institutional investors, their investment strategies differ from those of insurance companies, banks, investment funds, and private equity vehicles. Owing to their long-term investment horizons, trust-based obligations, and explicit social responsibility mandates, pension funds follow distinct operational logics (Crevoisier et al., 2025). In recent years, partly in response to heightened political debate and public scrutiny, their real estate investments appear to have become less intrusive and less exclusionary for tenants.

Pension funds face different risk-return profiles, and act accordingly: Pension funds are generally characterized by relatively risk-averse investment behaviour, as they depend on long-term, stable returns to secure future pension payments. This has consequences for how and where they invest, with a preference for sites where they have better knowledge and networks (Theurillat et al., 2010), and where institutional contexts more closely align with their objectives, including for example maintaining low vacancy rates. This also impacts international investment patterns because liabilities are typically denominated in domestic currency, so investments in foreign-currency markets are frequently perceived as carrying different financial risk, which needs to be actively managed.

This Special Issue invites paper contributions that aim to deepen understanding of the role of pension funds in an increasingly densified urban world (see hypotheses), where investments in housing have become both widespread and contested. The objectives of the Special Issue are fourfold:

1.Pension funds as institutional actors: advancing knowledge on the role, strategies, and investment practices of pension funds in housing markets, as well as the regulatory frameworks that govern these;

2.Differentiation among institutional investors: examining how pension funds differ from other institutional actors, as well as variations within the pension fund sector itself, in terms of investment behavior and outcomes;

3.Social responsibility and sustainability outcomes: analyzing how pension fund investments intersect with social responsibility (e.g. securing pension payments) and sustainability concerns (e.g. rent increases, tenant displacement, exclusion, social cohesion, neighborhood quality), as well as the associated mechanisms of accountability and control;

4.International case studies and comparative perspectives: generating insights from diverse national and urban contexts to understand how pension funds operate under different regulatory, political, and housing market conditions.