It’s not often you look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s life and think, with a fond sigh, how closely it resembles your own, but when she said that she had bought a California estate after finding it on Redfin, “my favourite pornography app”, I knew we were as one. Not in the multimillion-dollar purchase – a particular outcome that still cruelly eludes me – but in the online fantasising over property.
Redfin and Zillow are to the US what Rightmove and Zoopla are to the UK: aggregator portals that pull in property listings from almost every estate agent in the country. My own compulsive usage of them is definitely akin to some people’s relationship with porn – all right, hard drugs. In fact I began writing a column, the Rightmove Roundup, in my Substack newsletter mainly so my daughter would stop groaning every time she caught me scrolling through yet more houses I couldn’t afford to buy. I can now proudly tell her that noseying around other people’s interiors and making snide comments about them counts as work.
