Zillow Is Just Gossip With A Floor Plan

Our neighborhood in Philadelphia has hundreds of the same houses, twins with varying degrees of original design. When we moved into our own creaky yet unhaunted Victorian five years ago, the vestibule created a tricky problem regarding the layout of our living room, a problem I didn’t know how to resolve. I couldn’t just ring my neighbors’ doorbells and demand entry to see how they handled it (and I’d only needed to peer in the first room!), so I turned to the next best thing: wading through Zillow listings to see what the others had done.

There’s a line in Sarah Thankam Mathews’ novel from a few years ago, All This Could Be Different, that mocked me so well it’s seared in my memory: “Somewhere in their 20s, people like me become far too horny for interior design.” And it’s true: Over the past decade, my pointless online window shopping has shifted from adding party dresses to my cart to nosing through endless photos of houses for sale.

What can I say? Zillow captivates me.

Zillow surfing is a chance for us to look at architecture (high-minded) and a chance to admire or wince at interior design (rude, snobby, nosy, irresistible). It’s a chance to consider other options, either attainable (cozy row house in medium-small city), unattainable (lake houses in Vermont, pricy and adorable), or narrowly avoided (an apartment in our meanest ex’s neighborhood, neither affordable nor appealing). The real estate site’s got it all: voyeurism, fantasy, judgment about other people’s bad taste, validation about our own good taste.

It’s about imagining other lives — salivating over some, settling for others, and rejecting the rest. What an affirming experience it is to learn there are $5.8 million ugly mansions that you’d never even consider. It’s also a way to keep dreaming. My friend’s friend Claire used the site to find a house in Rhode Island in 2019 and another in Washington state in 2023. “I still look at Zillow in Rhode Island because I hope we’ll move back there someday, and looking at what’s for sale there makes that feel like more of a possibility,” she says.

It’s a way of staying connected, of keeping an eye on things. She uses it for other classic reasons, too: looking up the homes of people she knows, admiring gorgeous old houses (she just saw “an incredible 1896 Victorian”). When we see an open door of a house, we want to walk in and look around. We know the facade often conceals and deceives. What’s really going on behind that brick wall? What messes, what sunken living rooms, what vintage tiles await?

And also, Claire says, “I deleted my social media accounts earlier this year, so if I’m being honest, that’s probably led to some mindlessly clicking around on Zillow.” The gesture toward losing interest in other people’s lives never really leaves us.

Another friend’s friend, Jamie, likes to confirm she made the right choice by looking at her college town (Greensboro, North Carolina), where she wanted to stay, and her Maryland hometown, which she wanted to leave. She does the former by looking at the pretty houses she’d run past training for track; the latter by looking up addresses of old high school acquaintance’s parents as they start to sell their two-stories for a condo somewhere.

Sometimes other people suggest the lives we could be having. “My dad is constantly sending me places to buy in my neighborhood,” says my friend K., who lives in Philadelphia. “It’s just so easy for him to search.” My friend Robin, in the midst of sending apartments for rent to a friend after a breakup, likened searching Zillow to being “back on the apps.” It’s really a symbiotic situation: an enjoyable distraction for friends that they can channel into finding you a perfect place to live.

For many people, though, cruising Zillow allows one to indulge in human nature’s inherent nosiness. K. says they’re interested in it as a window into how people live: “I am zooming in on those bookshelves, seeing what they read.”

“I am an absolute sleuth on Zillow,” adds my friend Tyler. When he sees the address of someone in his outer circle (his mom’s friend’s daughter who inexplicably sent him a Christmas card), he will Zillow the house to see every interesting detail about her life. It’s a clue to someone’s interests (did the home gym entice them?), their taste (New England saltbox), their bank accounts (impressive). “Whenever anyone buys or sells a house,” he says, “know that I am nosing around for conjecture about what their finances might be.”

It’s even more delicious when the house belongs to a total stranger. You can be even more imaginative about their lives because fewer facts are grounding you. Looking at Zillow with friends who’d just bought a house in Providence, we all got locked into finding “pandemic renovations”: a certain type of loud, distracting wallpaper, homemade wall murals that signified boredom and a desperate desire for immediate, if misguided, change.

And then there are serious character judgments. For example, we see soullessness in the resale-friendly, space-maximizing, white paint contemporary renovation, a style best described by Erin Somers in her forthcoming novel The Ten Year Affair as a home that “resembled a farmhouse, if you’d never seen a farmhouse before.” We see the installation of a glass staircase with no railings at all (as if to set up an accidental murder) as preposterous but confident. As Xuan Juliana Wang wrote in her 2019 short story collection, Home Remedies, villains always have the best houses.

Zillow home trends expert Amanda Pendleton tells me the site’s usage exploded during 2020, and its data confirms that people turn to it when times are stressful. Unlike an Instagram account that makes your likes and follows public, the anonymity is liberating. “You can dream, and you can imagine, and nobody’s commenting on your searches,” Pendleton says. “There’s no one there telling you that you’re never going to make it happen.”

Zillow surfing is a means of escapism, an outlet where your imagination can run wild — and one that lets you gawk at the things that we’re never going to get. When I lived in Brooklyn, I’d trot by Park Slope’s most imperious brownstones and wonder if there was any way to leverage my whole life to acquire one. A couple weeks ago, I walked by an honest-to-God standalone house on the Upper East Side, which the site told me was $25 million.

The other day, my friend and I passed by movers loading a sexy, low, deep red couch (a $19,495 Lecco? A knockoff?). Hours later, she sent me the Zillow of the newly vacated address. The rooms downstairs were saturated in color, plaster walls restored. The upper floors were a disaster: a hole in the ceiling, splintery wood breaking through. Had the owners badly budgeted a renovation? Was there a breakup and the partner with the funds had decamped, leaving a half-finished house?

We’re projecting. We deduce a painful breakup, or a liberating departure from a complicated renovation. Or something in the middle! Or nothing like these scenarios at all, because we truly know nothing other than a few of their interior decor choices. In any case, it’s pure gossip, delivered via a real-estate site. We’re buying nothing; we’re seeing everything.