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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Health
Elle Hunt

Why we can’t stop looking at homes we’ll never own

Zillow Daniel Copley Danny Dorling United States
illustration of a person standing in front of an image of a dream home, with smaller images of phone screens overlayed
A 2021 survey found that 35% of US adults said they browsed Zillow ‘just for fun’, sometimes for hours at a time. Illustration: Rita Liu/The Guardian

I’ve turned off alerts for my dating app. I don’t care about likes on Instagram. The only notification that sends me rushing to unlock my phone is the one that says: “A new property has been added in your area.”

For months now I have been hooked on property websites, browsing homes within my budget and – even more tantalizingly – those that most definitely aren’t.

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