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Paper short abstract:

Hemnet.se is Sweden's largest real estate market. Focusing on the term "renovation" in the discursive home-making of real-estate ads, I discuss why in this age of "strong sustainability" and Agenda 2030, realtors may have to be challenged as invoking concerningly unsustainable consumption practices.

Paper long abstract:

Hemnet is Sweden’s largest digital real-estate market. Relative to visits per capita, it is the world’s most popular website for real-estate browsers. Hemnet markets itself as a place where dreams are made; the “best tool” for people to find their “dream house” (Hemnet 2021). It is not news that buying a home of one’s own is a coveted dream, that realtors do everything they can to attract buyers (Garber 2008), and that buyers have different motivations and plans for their purchases (Gunnemark 2019). But what is the dream house and home now presented on Hemnet? Real-estate agents do more than sell houses, they also promote the idea of “home as identity” (Andersson 2018). How is that identity constructed? What metaphors do imagined dwellers “live by” in their texts (Lakoff & Johnson 1980)? What is sold to whom? What are buyers supposed to do in and with their dream house? In addition to "charming" and "cozy", a very commonly used adjective is "renovated". Here, my reading of the application of renovation, and its various synonyms and collocates in Hemnet ads, aims to illustrate how home-making is construed as an arena where creative cultures of "renovated is the new Folkhem" (Enevold 2021), “heritage-preservation" (Rolfsdotter-Eliasson 2019), and “self-realization” (Lury 2011) intersect with the current global goals and demands of “strong sustainability” (Daly 2007) and Agenda 2030 (UN 2015). At this intersection, realtors regularly become, and may need to be challenged as, invokers of concerningly unsustainable consumption practices.