Thanks to Zillow, your friends know how much your house costs, or you are secretly rich
The phenomenon of Zillow Snooping is also consistent with the current political climate. Today’s young people are adults at one moment, marking a rebound to the income inequality and unrestricted billionaire class, a sentiment reflected in the popularity of performances succession and White lotus. Zillow’s public pricing details are an opportunity for those who want to seize or laugh at the rich to do it within their inner circle.
“You try to be very objective about this, but I think it inevitably seeps into what you think of someone,” Williams said.
Anna Goldfarb, author Modern friendshipSay, these findings can enable people to make assumptions and judges about their friends’ priorities. “It’s actually nothing to do with money,” Goldfarb said. “It’s the values surrounding money, it can be stabbed with friends.”
“One of the biggest reasons friendship fades out is the difference in values. So there’s a real risk here, kind of like, ‘Are we sharing values? It’s not that clear, but definitely implying that if you know your friend has debt and makes horrible financial choices, and then you look up her home on Zillow, you’ll make all kinds of judgments about that,” Goldfarb said.
But knowing friends seem to do a good job because they get a lot of help can also alleviate people’s insecurity, not just stoke.
Lucia Barker, 25, described her tendency to look up a friend’s apartment as “pathological curiosity,” but said the habit calmed her comparison of her financial situation with the financial situation of her peers, especially when it was clearly a friend’s standard of living, which could make her own living standards possible by factors other than their salary, i.e., earning money from her parents. New York magazine recently reported that nearly half of American parents provide financial support to their adult children, and only about one-third of American adults under 43 years of age support without parental help. But despite the fact that parent-subsidized lifestyles have become commonplace, the shame and confidentiality surrounding generational wealth remains. “Our world lacks financial transparency,” Buck said. “It’s helpful to know that other people’s lifestyles may be for other reasons.”
As money remains a cultural taboo, people should use a grain of salt to accept their Zillow survey results, financial therapist Aja Evans said. “You don’t know if they’re taking all the money out of all their retirement accounts, if someone helps them, if they borrow money from friends or someone else and then plan to repay them,” Evans said. “There are a lot of different situations.” “In fact, we don’t have a clear financial position on how they can achieve this.”
But sometimes, information appears by chance. For example, those looking for photos of friends’ new houses often get more information. “I like shows like this House Hunter Andrea Zlotowitz, 35, said: “So when a friend said I bought this house, it was an address and it was my first interest to see pictures of the house they bought.
Most of the people I talk to agree: Although many people know the availability of this information, it is often taboo to ask someone how much their home costs, or to ask the fact that you are looking for the answer.
“I recognize that there is some sensitivity to talk about money and know what people spend on things,” Zlotowitz said. “So, it’s certainly not something I’ll bring to friends in the future, but it’s no rent in my mind.”
Anyway, some people think that this behavior is within the scope of the new social contract that the information age brings: I can learn anything I want about you, you can learn anything you want about me, and we won’t talk about it. One even likens it to someone who censors the first date.
When my sister, a homeowner and avid Zillow user, I told me about the story: “I hope everyone who comes into my house knows exactly how much I bought for it.”
