Zillow surfing offers escape in pandemic
Millions of people have spent far more time at home than they expected to this year. It’s made many of them daydream about what it might be like to live somewhere else, often while scrolling through listings on Zillow.
“I go into neighborhoods that obviously I can’t afford as a college student and look at my ideal house and fantasize about when this is all over,” said Crystal Silva, 20, who lives in North Carolina. She spends hours surfing the app, touring homes she’ll never buy.
She’s not alone in that. Zillow usage has climbed since March, with online visitors to for-sale listings up more than 50 percent year-over-year in the early months of the pandemic.
What many are contemplating when they browse Zillow and similar homebuying sites — like Redfin, Trulia and Realtor.com — is not necessarily a purchase, but an alternate life. Zillow surfing has become a primary form of escapism for those who want to flee not just their homes but the reality of 2020.
Ione Damasco, 45, an academic librarian in Ohio, said she started to open up Zillow every day on her lunch break not long ago. “It’s a really personal thing,” she said. “It’s me daydreaming about what’s possible down the road. Right now I feel like the future is so uncertain, there’s something therapeutic about searching houses and starting to make plans for something with a positive outcome. It makes me think there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and someday I’ll be at my dream house.”
The amount of data Zillow provides, some say, is key in aiding their fantasies. While platforms like Pinterest and Instagram offer an endless stream of beautiful interiors, Zillow provides images, data, video tours and highly detailed information on each house. It’s easier to picture your future when you have access to the floor plan of the space or know which school your children would attend if you lived there.
Some will go to great lengths to find new and interesting houses. “I’ll see a house on Instagram then go to Google Maps to try to find the house using street view, then go to Zillow to look up what it’s currently worth, who bought it and historical price data,” said Kelsey Steele Cooper, 24, a hotel manager in Arkansas. “I’d like to think that hasn’t become my hobby, but I’ll use three different apps to take a look at this house that’s 1,000 miles away from me. That’s how much time we have on our hands in 2020.”
Tucker Boner, 27, began streaming Zillow hunts on Twitch nearly three years ago and has seen a bump in interest since the pandemic. He said the majority of his viewers are young millennials or members of Gen Z, people without the independent means to purchase a home. “This isn’t a 9-to-5-job-and-everyone-gets-a-home kind of economy,” he said.
After Ariel Norling, 29, a designer in Oakland, Calif., made a name for herself on Zillow Twitter by identifying unique, enviable listings around the country, she started a weekly house-hunting newsletter on Substack called I Know A Spot. “I’ve always been a Zillow scroller,” she said, “but it’s been a big activity for me as a part of quarantine. I felt like I was running out of things to do, Zillow felt like a different kind of outlet.
“I think for a lot of people, Zillow feels like the opposite of doomscrolling,” Norling said. “You’re stuck in your apartment, maybe you can’t move, but it’s easy to look at listings and imagine yourself in a different life. And maybe in that life, COVID isn’t happening.”