In the previous chapters I explored what state-led marketization looks like at its core. This work detailed the active strategies of the state in the formation of key calculative agencies (parent consumers, workers and providers), the related attempts to pacify childcare as a commodity purchased in the emergent market and the financial strategies of for-profit providers in response to state-led marketization. The significant increase of government spending on childcare, particularly through demand side funding mechanisms, has been argued to incite the interest of for-profit providers, to the detriment of the quality of care in the market. However, as more watchful commentators of neoliberal childcare markets have noted (Mitchell, 2013; Penn, 2013; Moss, 2014), private providers are not the only set of for-profit interests now involved. At the margins of these commentaries, it is possible to find property speculators and investors among others. The presence of these seemingly peripheral actors is an additional signal of the burgeoning desire to find new ways of extracting revenue from what has become a government funded sector.

In this, and the final empirical chapter, I will consider in more detail the engagement of what are seemingly tangential actors to the marketization of childcare. As the first of those two chapters, the focus here will be on the work of childcare property sales experts and investors in the wake of the 20 hours payment. In tracing the work of these actors, I will highlight the changing understanding of childcare property from a crucial part of the work of care, to a lucrative investment asset for financial actors with little knowledge, or indeed interest, in the daily practice of care. As a direct result of state-led marketization, the property assets of care services are being viewed as having ‘latent’ potential which can be unlocked through assetization, changing the view of childcare property from a building to an asset in an investment portfolio. New Zealand is not unique in this trend. Childcare property investment has become a burgeoning part of the ‘alternative real estate’ markets of the UK (Penn, 2013; Christie and Co., 2019) and to a greater degree Australia (Newell and Marzuki, 2019).