We’re all addicted to Zillow now

Heather McIlhany doesn’t peruse Instagram or X when she’s looking to kill time online. She got rid of all her social media accounts. Instead, she heads to Zillow.

McIlhany, a marketing consultant in Arlington, Va., is not actually in the market to buy a home right now. That’s irrelevant to her real estate browsing, which she describes as “free, upbeat fantasizing.” She tends to start with nearby listings, but “then you kind of end up a little bit down the rabbit hole.” What homes are available in Denver, where her sisters live? What could she afford in her hometown of Tulsa? What if she picked up and moved to a Vermont farmhouse or to Scotland? She can try on all the lives she could have had or still might have, without ever leaving the couch.

In the more than two decades since online listings came into being, they have become a key part of many folks’ scrolling diets. Numbers provided to the Washington Post by Zillow are staggering: 2.4 billion visits to its site for the first quarter of 2025 alone. Compare that to the just over 4 million homes sold in the United States in all of 2024. And, of course, Zillow is just one option for home listings.

What accounts for all of those clicks? There are actual house hunters, of course, but also homeowners keeping tabs on the local market (and keeping tabs on their neighbors). For renters, it’s the equivalent of window shopping, both aspirational and masochistic. And for anyone who loves to dissect a home’s features, description, and photos in their group chat, it’s a sort of Page Six, filled with blind items, revealing information, and intrigue.

“The sharing of and conversation about real estate and about homes in your community, or outside your community, is a social norm now,” says Chris Linsell, the director of content for Luxury Presence, a digital platform for real estate agents, and a real estate agent based in Traverse City, Mich. “I know I do this with my friends. We shoot each other Zillow listings when the house next door [to] one of us or one of our friends or neighbors goes up for sale.”

Part of it is simple curiosity. What does it look like in there? How did that kitchen renovation turn out? Are the ceilings as high as they look? And it puts each one of us in the role of HGTV host, getting to survey each room with a critical eye. “It’s fun to imagine yourself in that space or to agree or disagree with the decisions being made about the decorating or about the square footage or whatever,” Linsell says.

Listings also offer a startling amount of information — the home’s layout, sale history, environmental risks, annual tax bill, and more. “Twenty years ago, my parents and their contemporaries would be shocked and offended if someone was like, ‘How much are you gonna spend on your house?’” says Linsell. “Now, nobody seems to care because … all I have to do is Google your address and I can find a Zillow listing. I mean, it’s the first result.”

Michele Gelfand, a Stanford University professor of organizational behavior, sees this trend as part of an age-old human love for inside information. She cowrote a recent academic paper that used computer models and discovered that gossip evolved to help communities work together.

“The digital real estate boom taps into this same ancient instinct — when we browse home listings, we’re essentially gathering social intelligence about potential neighbors and community members,” Gelfand says over email. “This lets them assess potential neighbors’ values and reliability.”

And even long after the sale has gone through, all kinds of information about the home remain a click away. It’s the digital equivalent of rifling through the medicine cabinet.

“I have friends who are single who, before they go over to a new boyfriend or girlfriend’s house, they will Google the house to see it, in the same way that they do the social media snoop,” says Linsell. “It’s almost like part of the vetting process now.”

The listings have trained us to understand a special euphemistic code, in which cozy means small, “as-is” instructs you to buckle up, and just about everything is “sunlit.” Social media accounts such as Zillow Gone Wild blast out the most outrageous and eye-catching ones. But a listing doesn’t have to include a Lego replica or be the childhood home of the new pope for it to be of interest.

When Rohit Saxena, an architect in Arlington, Mass., visits a new place, one of the first things he does is look at online home listings. “Any city that I go to, I picture living there,” he says. “Like, hey, what would it mean living in Seattle? And I wonder what the houses here go for.” Sometimes, he discovers that he couldn’t afford it. But often enough, “we could live in a beautiful home over here for a lot less” than in the Boston area. Sometimes it validates his own home purchase, “but the reverse could be true, too.”

He also loves local online listings “as an architect and as somebody who’s curious, just like anybody else who wants to know how people live.” Saxena is especially interested in seeing how the historic homes nearby have been remodeled to fit modern lifestyles. He and his daughter often share links and attend open houses together.

For Maria Simon, a lawyer in Bethesda, Md., the act of sharing a listing with her then-boyfriend quickly cascaded into marriage. A beautiful home popped up on her feed. “I was like, wow, that is exceptional and it fits everything that we would want, and I sent it to him,” she says. She didn’t mean anything by it other than “we could live in a house like this some day.” They decided to attend the open house and ultimately put in an offer, which was accepted. “It was like, oh, we should probably catch our personal life up to our real estate. So then we were like, all right, let’s get married.”

Just as following the siren song of a listing can change or speed up someone’s life path, the mere existence of listings can convey unintended information. A couple might soft-launch their divorce, for instance, or another big change when their home appears on Zillow or Redfin.

Linsell had a client who accepted a job in another state, set to begin months later. Even though they wanted to get the ball rolling on selling their home, “they didn’t want their existing job to know,” he says. “Listing their house for sale would be a signal that they didn’t want to have to worry about.” So they ended up deciding to wait a bit longer before putting it on the market.

Lydia Hallay, a broker at Living Room Realty in Portland, Ore., has noticed how clients’ constant scrolling of listings can warp their in-person expectations: “When we go out touring for the first time, [I’m] honestly kind of punching holes in dreams a little bit because folks really don’t know that there are all these tricks that stagers and photographers have up their sleeve to make homes look better than they really are.” It’s a bit like connecting with someone over an online dating app and realizing when you finally meet up that they Facetuned their photos.

When scouring listing photos, Hallay is looking more for pragmatic hints than aesthetics: whether the electrical panel has been updated, how old the furnace is, and other “unsexy realities of shopping for a home.”

What Simon first looks for in a listing has changed over time, reflecting the way her life priorities have. In law school, she eyed condos near Metro stops and nightlife. Now, with a family, she’s more interested in a listing’s school system.

For many, though, a real house hunt couldn’t be further from reach. So instead, they turn to these online listings as a calorie-free substitute. “Homeownership has become much more difficult,” says Linsell. “And this has become a place where you go and look at the things that you can’t have.”