Given the Real Estate Market, Your Distracted Co-Worker Is Probably On Zillow

The difficulty of finding a house or apartment in this real estate market often means that employees have to leave Zoom meetings, customer-facing tasks or virtually any other work situation if they get a notice about a property matching their criteria as not doing so means they will likely lose it. JL 

Callum Borchers reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Over two years of the pandemic housing markets all over the country have gone bonkers while many workers have gone remote. In some cities, people are paying premiums for houses they haven’t seen in person. Prospective buyers sign up to be alerted by Zillow, Redfin or similar services whenever properties are listed. Those notices can come at any time—in the middle of a Zoom meeting, or while studying spreadsheets—and people on the receiving end of those emails understandably can’t wait until close of business to schedule a showing or make an offer, lest a rival bidder get there first.

It started as a digital fantasy. Then Madeline Khare took things offline. 

The object of her desire is Los Angeles real estate—a new apartment for herself and a house for her parents, who are considering a move from Louisiana. The 25-year-old self-described “ Zillow addict” works from her current apartment as a cartoon show writer, and her lunchtime browsing recently escalated to booking showings on breaks.

“You blink your eyes and it’s like, ‘Oh my God. I need to go back to work,’” says Ms. Khare, adding that her property searches would sometimes eat up hours at a time during workdays and drag late into the night.

She has sworn off tours on Mondays through Fridays, saying she had to set some boundaries: “It was really spiraling out of control.”

From “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “MTV Cribs” to #FridayNightZillow, real estate is a longtime American obsession. What’s changed over two years of the pandemic is that housing markets all over the country have gone bonkers while many workers have gone remote.

In some cities, people are paying premiums for houses they haven’t seen in person. Prospective buyers sign up to be alerted by Zillow, Redfin or similar services whenever properties that meet certain criteria are listed. Those notices can come at any time—in the middle of a Zoom meeting, or while studying spreadsheets—and people on the receiving end of those emails understandably can’t wait until close of business to schedule a showing or make an offer, lest a rival bidder get there first.

But let’s face it, plenty of us are just surfing property sites to get a peek at how people in a $17 million condo on the Upper East Side with views of Central Park live. Or, to dream of the day we might actually get that beach house in Florida. (Have you seen the “Saturday Night Live” sketch about real estate “porn”?) After staring at the same old walls, month after month, as we work from home, who could blame us?

Workers have always treated themselves to mental breaks, like loitering at the office water cooler before Covid-19 struck, or, going back a few more years, stepping outside for a cigarette. Cruising real estate listings every day has become the new smoke break—the latest way to decompress but way better for your physical health. It’s also an easy indulgence with no boss to look over your shoulder.

Zillow Group Inc. says its largest traffic gains during the pandemic have come on weekdays. When I asked the company’s home trends expert, Amanda Pendleton, to find out which day of the week is busiest overall, she surprised herself with the answer.

“I wouldn’t have guessed Tuesday,” she says. Sure enough, Tuesday beats Saturday and Sunday—even though most open houses are held on weekends. The reason is many realtors list properties on Tuesdays, and people can’t resist the urge to click immediately.

Redfin gave me an hour-by-hour breakdown of its highest traffic times. Ten of the top 25 are on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Pre-pandemic, just five of the 25 most popular times were during standard work hours. 

So, if your co-worker seems a little distracted on a video call, there’s a decent chance he’s looking at listings in another browser tab. 

A Zillow-owned house on the market last month; Zillow says weekday traffic on its website has surged.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Jimmy Humphrey, 39, is hunting for a smaller house after a divorce, and signed up to receive alerts when new inventory comes on the market in Charlotte, N.C. The swiping starts “as soon as I see a notification,” he says. “That can be during the day, while I’m working.”

The beauty of Mr. Humphrey’s habit is it’s arguably work-related. He’s a mortgage underwriter who needs a firm grasp of property values in his region.

“You start maybe browsing for work and you’re just, like, ‘Oh, this is nice,’ and you want to see more of the area,” he says. “And you just keep going.”

For Athena Thiel, property searching is less serendipitous and more scientific. A military spouse who moves frequently, she has developed a four-stage process in which she spends progressively more time scouring listings in the months before her husband is transferred. 

She’s in stage one, at the moment, logging four hours a week on Zillow as her family prepares to leave Washington state for California this summer. Eventually, she’ll put in 10 hours a week.

Ms. Thiel has parlayed her real estate know-how into a full-time consulting business, helping other military families relocate. The only trouble is her personal browsing “takes away from time that I could be coaching or marketing the business,” she says. “They’re competing priorities.”

People who spend working hours on real estate sites probably aren’t addicted in the clinical sense, says Kent Berridge, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan. But in the same way that recreational-drug and alcohol consumers might be prone to abuse when those substances are readily available, property aficionados are liable to get carried away when freed from the watchful eyes of their supervisors, he adds.

Lauryn Thompson says she couldn’t scroll through photos of quartz countertops and sprawling backyards when she reported to an office, but working from her apartment in Jacksonville, Fla., lets her check new listings “every couple of hours.”

“I’m always on Zillow, and it’s kind of hilarious,” the 24-year-old says.

Ms. Thompson and her partner hope to buy a starter home in the next six months. Like others who described their workday browsing to me, she emphasized that she still hits her deadlines and can make up for diversions by finishing tasks outside the traditional 9-to-5 window.

Some jobs aren’t so flexible. Jordan Magrath is a high-school English teacher in Washington state and can’t use his smartphone during class. So, in the hallway between periods, Mr. Magrath, 33, is as glued to his device as the passersby who are half his age.

“People might think I’m texting or something, but usually I’m seeing what three or four homes have come on Zillow,” he says.

Vigilance has paid off. After being outbid twice, Mr. Magrath and his wife closed this week on a house six hours across the state that they didn’t visit before making an offer. He thought he’d immediately quit Zillow, but he’s kept looking at properties.

It’s a hard habit to break.