The phenomenon of Zillow snooping also feels in line with the current political climate. Today’s young adults came of age in a moment marked by a growing backlash towards income inequality and an unfettered class of billionaires, a sentiment reflected in the popularity of shows like Succession and The White Lotus. Zillow’s public pricing details give people who want to gawk at or mock the rich an opportunity to do just that within their inner circles.
“You try to be pretty objective about it, but I think it inevitably ends up seeping into your perception of someone,” Williams says.
Anna Goldfarb, author of Modern Friendship, says these discoveries can lead people to make assumptions and judgments about their friends’ priorities. “It’s really not about money,” Goldfarb, says. “It’s the values around money where it can get prickly with friends.”
“One of the biggest reasons friendships fade is the difference in values. So there’s a real risk here of looking deeply into finances, because you’re sort of putting your friendship on the line, like, ‘Do we share values?’ It’s not that explicit, but it’s definitely implied that, well, if you know your friend is in debt and makes terrible financial choices, and then you look up her home on Zillow, you’re going to make all sorts of judgments about that,” Goldfarb says.
But knowing that a friend appears to be doing well because they’re getting a lot of help can also ease people’s insecurities rather than just stoke them.
Lucia Barker, 25, describes her inclination to look up her friends’ apartments as “a morbid curiosity” but says the habit has quelled her tendency to compare her own financial situation to those of her peers, particularly when it becomes clear a friend’s standard of living is made possible through factors other than their salary—namely, money from their parents. New York Magazine recently reported that nearly half of parents in the US provide financial support to their adult children and that, among American adults under 43, only about one-third support themselves without help from their parents. But despite the fact that parent-subsidized lifestyles have become commonplace, a sense of shame and secrecy surrounding generational wealth persists. “There’s such a lack of financial transparency in our world,” Barker says. “It’s just helpful to know that other people’s lifestyles might be because of some other reason.”
Financial therapist Aja Evans says that since money remains a cultural taboo, people should take their Zillow findings with a grain of salt. “You have no idea if they pulled all of their money from all of their retirement accounts, if somebody helped them, if they borrowed money from a friend or somebody else and then planned on paying them back. There are so many different scenarios,” says Evans. “We don’t actually have a clear financial picture of how they were able to make that happen.”
But sometimes the information comes up by happenstance. Those looking for photos of a friend’s new house, for example, are often met with far more information than they asked for. “I love shows like House Hunter and anything on HGTV,” says Andrea Zlotowitz, 35. “So when a friend says, ‘I bought this house, here’s the address,’ to be able to see the pictures of the home that they purchased is my first interest,” she says. But regardless of her intentions, she inevitably stumbles upon details of her friend’s financial standing. “I see what they paid for it, and I can see the full price history.”
Most of the people I spoke to agreed: Although many are aware of the availability of this information, it’s generally still taboo to ask someone directly how much their home costs or to bring up the fact that you’ve sought out the answer.
“I recognize that there are some sensitivities talking about money and knowing what people spend on things,” says Zlotowitz. “So it’s certainly not something that I would later bring up to a friend, but it lives rent-free in the back of my mind.”
Regardless, some think this behavior is within the bounds of the new social contract brought on by the information age: I can learn anything I want about you, and you can learn anything you want about me—we just won’t talk about it. One person even likened it to vetting people before a first date.
As my sister, a homeowner and avid Zillow user, told me when I mentioned this story, “I expect that everyone who enters my home knows exactly how much I bought it for.”
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