Segmentación del mercado inmobiliario y acceso a asesoría en contextos urbanos

Abstract

This monograph addresses a question that the literature on urban inequality has typically treated in fragmentary fashion: why formal real estate brokerage and advisory services cluster in higher-income neighborhoods while the most severe patrimonial problems occur in low-income ones, and how these two facts relate to each other. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Abramo, Jaramillo, and Smolka, and on recent data from DANE, Fedelonjas, the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, and IGAC, the study brings together two bodies of literature that rarely engage with one another: that of housing problems in low-income households and that of the economic geography of the formal services market. The argument is that the territorial asymmetry of professional advice operates as a non-wage mechanism for the reproduction of patrimonial inequality: each decision made without technical support, a misset rent, a succession appraised at an outdated cadastral value, an unwritten tenancy, entails a small net transfer of value from the popular household toward better-informed agents, and the aggregation of those transfers over time builds a gap that income alone cannot explain. The conclusion opens a concrete field of action for cadastral engineering: the multipurpose cadastre, public appraisals, and the georeferencing of informal markets are operational tools, already available in Colombia, capable of partially correcting that asymmetry.