Financialization and tourism: the role of real estate investment trusts in Brazil

Global financialization has expanded interest-bearing capital through new financial instruments, such as real estate investment trusts (REITs), converting real estate into assets that realize financial capital by producing space. Simultaneously, tourism growth under neoliberal capitalism has driven the expansion of real estate developments aimed at tourist consumption. In this dynamic, tourism-related real estate offers investment opportunities for funds, enabling the channeling of resources into construction and rental management. Nevertheless, this relationship remains underexplored in tourism-critical political economy approaches. This analysis examines the interconnections among tourism, space production, and financialization through REIT investments in tourism properties across Brazil. Methodologically, the study uses a critical, dialectical, and multiscalar approach grounded in documentary research, employing qualitative methods supported by quantitative data. The documentary corpus includes management reports from selected REITs and tourism-related real estate securitization terms published from 2016 to 2026. New dynamics across tourism, finance, and social space could be identified. First, the partnership between tourism and financial capital is established through the exploitation of real estate, allowing REIT investors to earn income while tourism companies profit, both through space reproduction that combines financial, real estate, and ‘tourism’ capital. Second, REITs have recently expanded their investments beyond hotels to include short-term rental properties, often in partnership with management platforms. Third, this process combines profit and income in the (re)production of tourism space, mainly in urban centralities. Fourth, the exploitation of territories previously outside traditional tourism indicates a new strategic geographic expansion of tourism in Brazil, characterized by specific forms of space production driven by financial logic. The main theoretical contribution to studies on the tourism-finance connection highlights a reciprocal relationship in which tourism generates profits and can expand geographically through financial instruments, while financial capital finds in tourism a means to extract rents and a new frontier for financial accumulation.