Crain's weighs in on "real estate porn" addicts

Web sites like www.zillow.com and www.gardenweb.com appeal to our baser selves, or so says a story in the March 5 issue of Crain’s Chicago Business: trolling sites to get estimates on friends’ and neighbors’ property values amounts to “real estate porn” or “yuppie pornography.”

We have to hand it to Crain’s on this one – instead of just chalking up this phenomenon to Internet culture, the story includes an interview with the vaunted Joseph Epstein, cultural commentator and author of Snobbery: The American Version, who points out that seeing what other people are worth is hardly new. And the story actually mentions that many people still get their voyeuristic real estate fix from those fading behemoths, newspapers.

(Visited 40 times, 1 visits today)