Zillowing hits you where you live
FOR ALL OF US who carry on a tortured romance with Internet voyeurism, there’s a new flame in town. Zillow.com, which launched Feb. 8 and attracted so many users that the site crashed in less than 12 hours, is as close as we’ve come to a virtual epicenter of the American consciousness. Granted, it doesn’t let us secretly probe the brains of friends and strangers to learn their innermost thoughts, but almost: We can access the ultimate metaphor for their aspirations -- their property values.
By simply typing in the address of almost any home in the United States, Zillow provides an estimate of the market value of the property, the most recent sale price of that property, the approximate square footage, the values of the neighboring homes and a satellite photo of the whole street.
In other words, not only will you learn that your neighbor paid $180,000 for a house that’s now worth $1 million, you’ll finally understand how it is they’re driving a new Lexus even though their chief income comes from making radio documentaries about fish colonies. Keeping up with the Joneses is no longer about things like swimming pools and riding mowers. It’s the equity, stupid! God himself couldn’t re-fi and end up as lucky as people who bought in the ‘70s.
How could the site not have imploded from overuse? As reported in this paper, Seattle-based Zillow launched a public test at 9 p.m. on Feb. 7 and had more than 300,000 hits by 6 the next morning, when it collapsed under the weight of Americans’ walloping preoccupation with real estate. It didn’t regain its footing until later in the afternoon, after which the frenzy resumed. Zillow won’t release the number of hits it’s received, but, according to a company spokesperson, “it’s been beyond our wildest dreams.”
That’s if you can get to sleep. Since I got my hands on Zillow, I’ve zoomed in on the homes of at least 20 friends and neighbors, not to mention a handful of crushes, colleagues, former professors, former bosses and the random celebrity whose address I happen to have. I also found myself Zillowing a number of ex’s, their ex’s and the women they dated after they broke up with me.
Don’t ask me how it reached such a pitiful point -- other than that it was after 2 a.m. and I was slightly drunk. It was as if my hand, like a planchette on a Ouija board, moved on its own accord. “Keep Zillowing!” some Beelzebub whispered in my ear, even as I tried to get up and go to bed. “Keep comparing yourself to others and seeing how badly you can feel about yourself. It’s not masochistic; it’s the American way.”
OK, I may be exaggerating. I wasn’t that drunk. And I’m sorry to say that a good number of my ex’s still don’t own property (actually, am I sorry? No!). Besides, I own a house too, which Zillow tells me is worth more than what I bought it for, although considering that the market is “softening” (what a nice, cozy aphorism for “potentially dropping precipitously”), this is not a page I plan on bookmarking.
Let’s face it, there are myriad opportunities for benign Internet stalking. Google, which allows us to view everything from the campaign contributions to the 10K results of complete strangers, is still the gold standard in time wastage. But Zillow, quite literally, hits us where we live. Real estate has become more than a shelter for our families, our furniture and our creative impulses. It’s an extension of our souls. I’m hardly the first to point this out. For dozens of reasons -- over-inflation, fear of terrorism, access to relatively inexpensive goods and services that allow more people than ever to buy decent-looking coffee tables at IKEA and pay someone else to dust them -- the spaces we inhabit have come to seem more relevant than the Earth that surrounds them.
To look up someone’s property value is, perversely, to measure the contours of their very existence. Zillowing (soon to be a household word, I guarantee) involves a measurement that goes beyond square footage, location and rates of appreciation. It offers an intangible yet extraordinarily revealing window into our aspirations.
Our homes tell the story of where we’ve been, what we desired and how we turned those desires into realities. Our property histories reveal where those desires took us. They reveal our ability to stay in one place. They show where we’re willing to compromise, what we’re willing to rehabilitate and, above all, how much we’re willing to pay. They tell us things about our own characters -- our stubbornness, our recklessness, our wisdom and our luck -- that we really do not want to know.
But our friends and neighbors do. And now they can. How cool is the Internet?
