‘Characteristic four-bedroom town house with a large walled garden.’ I click approvingly. Beautiful facade, that’s already a stroke of luck. High ceilings, oak parquet, an Art Nouveau skylight and marble mantelpieces from 1910: handsome, handsome. I swipe through the photos on my favorite real estate app. Oh look: a cute walled garden with fountain. Perfectly renovated with an EPC B, well, well, you can already do something with that. Hola, a walk-in shower in travertine. But wait a minute: a bathroom furniture in zebra stripes. And then the price: ridiculous, at least 150,000 euros too much.
I know the market by now. No, you can’t fool me anymore when it comes to real estate, that’s how I tell myself. Some people bake cakes to relax, I check real estate sites. Crazy, because I don’t want a characterful four-bedroom mansion with an Art Nouveau skylight at all, I don’t even plan to move. It started when I started looking for a new house.
Every day, what can I say, every hour I checked the real estate sites, because the best houses are sold immediately. The search on real estate sites was stressful, frustrating, exhausting. Now I have a house, but I never stopped looking and comparing. It also started like this with a colleague, a usually very down-to-earth and rational man in his fifties: he was looking for a new place to live, found what he was looking for and still kept surfing and swiping. Necessity, to his own surprise, became a hobby. He is now a seasoned real estate site voyeur, with specific preferences. He prefers to check homes in the Netherlands, ‘because you always get a floor plan too’. This is how hardcore such an addiction can become.
Mine also sometimes takes on absurd forms. When my neighbor put his newly renovated house online to sell, I secretly checked the photos. While I could have just as well asked to take a look inside. Many people just hang around on real estate sites. Zimmo, the second largest real estate platform in our country, has 6.2 million visitors every month. But of only 3.2 percent, or about 200,000 people, Zimmo is certain that those users are actively looking for a home. It concerns people who contact a real estate agent through their classifieds pages, by e-mail or by telephone. Although those 6.2 million people naturally also include users who contact the broker directly.
Am I happy? Or can it be better?
But still: every month Zimmo has six million users of whom no one knows exactly what they are looking for there. Confirmation maybe? On the Immowebs and Zimmo’s of this world I want to be reassured that I did the right thing buying my house. It’s worth living there. That I got my money’s worth. What’s more, that the market value is rising, because look what they dare to ask for a comparable house five blocks away.
Although, I now see, the neighbor’s house has been gathering online dust on Immoweb for a suspiciously long time. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Sometimes there is not even grass. Or does the ‘spacious patio’ turn out to be just a cramped courtyard. You also learn that from hours of plowing through real estate ads. Confirm my domestic happiness, I ask with every swipe. Or unsettle it. Because, paradoxically, I’m also drawn to the idea that things are better elsewhere. “Home is where love lives,” says the proverb. But true love has no moisture problems. Sometimes leaving is the best option. And imagine if I miss that one opportunity. Such a fantastic 1960’s bungalow, affordably priced too. Or a mansion full of character with a walled garden without a zebra-striped bathroom. That hip, bright apartment with a view of the water. It’s fomo in bricks.
Fantasy with bricks
Looking at houses is also inventing the inhabitants. I imagine that a freshly combed newly blended family lives in the much too expensive mansion full of character. She works as a freelancer in the cultural sector, loves prints and always wears two different socks because that makes her more interesting. He is a history teacher and keeps the house neat and tidy. Their children know perfectly well that they have to play carefully with all those Art Nouveau stained glass windows in the house. They can’t agree on the bathroom decor. She eventually won and got her stripes. Fantasizing is part of the fun.
Sometimes I put ‘most expensive first’ on my search results. Delicious. Did I mention I don’t set a maximum price? A colleague in his early twenties, not yet a real estate owner, regularly dreams away at million-dollar villas in Ghent, she says, ‘sometimes for hours on end for days on end’. They are houses she will never be able to buy, she knows. She finds inspiration for the design of her own, more modest rental apartment. Her friends do the same, she says. “Maybe because it reminds us of The Sims, or other furnishing and design games we’re too old for now. Or a realistic Pinterest board, with houses and interiors from my neighbourhood.’
Going to see houses in person is for the real junkies. It’s a small minority, says Kristof Welleman, but they exist, the people who pretend to be house hunting when they don’t want to buy a house at all. Welleman is a real estate agent at Architectenwoning, whose portfolio includes houses by Léon Stynen. The kind of houses that sometimes make you dream. He actually has sympathy for the real estate voyeur. ‘It sometimes happens that people say: “We would like to come and see this house because we really love it and want to get inspiration for our renovation”. If people are honest about that, I have no problem with that. If the architect is still alive, they sometimes also contact him. I may not earn anything from it, but I see it as a form of customer loyalty: one day they may really want to buy a house from you.’
My addiction so far only takes place online. Although I readily admit that it is difficult for me to pass a window of a real estate office without taking a look at the advertisements. But skimming the visiting days of real estate agents? I’m not that far yet. For now, I’m just wasting my own time, not that of other property owners.
2023-05-17 15:00:00
#addicted #real #estate #sites #hardcore
