Thanks to Zillow, Your Friends Know How Much Your House Costs—or if You're Secretly Rich

WIRED

07-07-2025

Jul 7, 2025 6:00 AM A quick search of your friends' addresses can yield one of the most private details of their financial lives. Some people say their wealthy acquaintances aren't happy about it. Photo-Illustration:When Rebecca Kornman was a student at Kenyon College, she and some of her friends picked up a voyeuristic hobby. Using the Ohio liberal arts school's student directory, they found students' home addresses and looked them up on Zillow to see how much their families' homes cost.
'It became a kind of controversial thing that people were talking about,' says Kornman, 25. While some found it endlessly entertaining to dive into the finances of a student body where almost one in five students come from families in the top 1 percent, the popular pastime struck a nerve with a particular crowd.
'People would always frame it as, 'Well, you shouldn't do that, because some people are embarrassed about where they live.'' But she found out that one of the main crusaders against the resource was a student who grew up in a multimillion-dollar home in SoHo, Manhattan. And another student who, she says, was 'outwardly saying that they were broke and they grew up in poverty' was just one Zillow search away from being found out. 'Someone was like, 'Bro, go on the directory. They live in a brownstone, a five-story brownstone.''
'I think it's definitely more taboo the more money you have,' Kornman says. 'You're all on the same page when you're in college. And so to differentiate each other, especially if someone's going out of their way to maybe obscure some of the facts of their life, it gives you good perspective.'
Zillow, the hugely popular and addictive real-estate platform launched in 2006, has gone from simply a tool to buy and sell homes to a full-fledged phenomenon. It's used by 227 million unique visitors every month and had 2.4 billion visits in just the first quarter of 2025. (The company has such a vice-grip on real estate listings, it was recently sued by Compass for its alleged attempted monopoly on online home listings.) Turns out, it owes its mass appeal, in part, to nosy people looking to satisfy their undying curiosity about their peers' financial lives.
When you look up an address on Zillow, a Zestimate—Zillow's estimate of a given property's current value—appears below photos of the property. It's calculated using 'millions of data points' including public records, MLS (multiple listing service) feeds, tax assessments, recent sales, and updates provided directly from homeowners, according to Claire Carroll, a spokesperson for Zillow. Carroll says the estimates are fairly accurate, with a median error rate nationwide of just under 2 percent for on-market homes and 7 percent for off-market homes. The price history, which includes dates of past sales with corresponding prices, is sourced through public property records, county tax assessors, and local MLS. Zillow also provides an estimation of monthly rent for rental units.
Zillow does not give users the option to hide their home's Zestimate and price history. 'Open access to this kind of public information is a really important part of a fair housing market,' says Amanda Pendleton, Zillow's home trends expert. But while not everyone is thrilled with having the value and cost of their home on full display for anyone who's curious, others take full advantage of the publicity of this information by actively searching for the details of their friends' housing costs—and some are extrapolating Zillow's figures to get a fuller picture of their friends' financial situations.
Like Kornman, Gillian Williams, 27, took up this pastime in college, using a database provided by her school, the University of Delaware. 'I looked up everyone I knew,' she says.
'It was just interesting to be like, 'Oh my gosh, I didn't know you're from—your parents own a multimillion dollar house in the Hamptons,'' she says.
Now, as a resident of the notoriously expensive city of Washington, DC, she continues to use the platform as a means of gaining insight into her peers' financial lives—specifically to answer the question of how they get by considering the city's high cost of living.
'Years ago I went over to a new friend's apartment, and immediately on my walk home I was looking up how much she probably paid and then doing a little bit of math to be like, 'Well, if you're paying that much money for rent, what is your salary?'' Williams says. She says she based her calculation on the widely accepted idea that people should spend a maximum of 30 percent of their monthly income on housing.
Salary is just one of the insights she's gained through extrapolating data from Zillow. 'It's kind of an easy way to find out if their family is helping them pay,' she says. And after discovering how much a friend paid in rent, she asked how they manage to pay their bills and learned that they were struggling with significant credit card debt. 'I didn't realize that probably more of my friends than I think are in credit card debt specifically, not just student loans but credit card debt, because they're trying to make ends meet, or they're living outside of their means to meet a lifestyle that they want or they expect.'
Vivian Tu, a financial literacy content creator and author known as @yourrichbff on TikTok and Instagram, says young people today are particularly susceptible to spending outside of their budget. 'I think a huge part of that is the comparison game. Back in our parents' generation, we had 'keeping up with the Joneses,'' she says. 'For the most part you were looking at your neighbors, and those are people who were relatively within the same tax bracket.'
Social media, she says, has replaced the Joneses with the Kardashians. 'All of a sudden you're not comparing yourself to people who are relatively your net-worth equal. You're comparing yourself to everybody on Earth, and you are starting to see levels of insurmountable wealth, like unimaginable wealth, that the vast majority of us will never ever obtain,' says Tu.
This, combined with a lack of mandated financial education and the fact that many young adults feel disenfranchised by the US's economic system, can make the pursuit of wealth feel like a nonstarter. 'Instead of trying to be rich, be wealthier, be financially stable, we're trying to look rich, look wealthy, look financially stable,' she says. 'That means you drive a nice car, it means you live in a nice apartment. It means you have nice things to wear, and you're always in a cute new outfit on Instagram.'
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.'