I have a group chat with my three best friends from college, and as the pandemic drags on, our conversation has basically become an ongoing series of real estate ads.
“Look at this place,” I texted last week, sending a link to a school converted into a farmhouse in Vermont, which was in desperate need of maintenance. My friends responded kindly, “My God, so much space,” one wrote, while another sent a message: “Think about the things you could do with this kitchen!” They know I have no intention of moving now, and neither do they, but that doesn’t stop us from combing online listings, looking for crazy wallpapers, foot baths and, more recently, places to talk.
My boyfriend and I played a similar game, asking each other to look at the list of expensive lakefront condos in Chicago, where we are both originally, with a kind of breathless enthusiasm – which is one of the reasons for “Saturday Night Live This weekend’s sketch, simply titled “Zillow”, looked just like a small so real.
In the style of an old school telephone sex ad late at night on television, Ego Nwodim mutters suggestively to the camera: “Are you looking for something to spice up your life?” The answer is not sex. You are almost 30, says the sketch, and you need a new fantasy: real estate pornography.
“The pleasure you once had with sex now comes from looking at other people’s homes,” Nwodim continues, as the camera finally passes over to Bowen Yang and guest host Dan Levy going to bed together to see Zillow. “The guest house has its own kitchen,” says Levy. “So bad.” Yang begins to squirm in ecstasy.
“So what are you waiting for?” Heidi Gardner adds in a narration. “Pick up the phone now. Open the app and tell us what you really want.”
Viewers responded immediately. “We may be a divided country, but I think most of us can at least agree that the Zillow draft on SNL came very close to home tonight,” wrote one Twitter user, while another replied, “At 35, the Commercial zillow is probably the best and most accurate SNL skit I’ve ever seen. ”
Even Zillow CEO Rich Barton, tweeted a link to the sketch with the caption: “Wait. Have we been marketing Zillow wrong all these years ???”
Having a home with the necessary white fence has been part of the American dream for a long time, but the concept of “real estate pornography” really took off in the mid-1990s, when sites like Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy and Redfin were launched. They made real estate listings available – including prices, photos and mortgage rates – to scroll through on the comfort of your couch.
House hunting is no longer a reserved need for when you really had to switch to a spectator sport, a development that was only catalyzed by networks like HGTV – which, in 2016, overtook CNN as the third channel to most watched cable behind Fox News and ESPN – and publications like Curbed and Apartment Therapy, which share popular lists and still feature headlines like “A $ 528,000 one-bedroom Park Slope and a vaulted West Village apartment.”
It’s a lot of fantasy food, especially since homeownership seems increasingly out of reach for many millennials, many of whom have faced two recessions during their careers. In addition, as reported by NPR in 2019, student loan debt in the United States has more than doubled in the past decade, to about $ 1.5 trillion, and the Federal Reserve now estimates that it is reducing capacity to generate millennium of buying houses.
“Home ownership rates for people aged 24 to 32 fell by almost 9 percentage points between 2005 and 2014 – effectively reducing property rates in general,” wrote reporter Yuki Noguchi. “In January, the Fed estimated that 20% of this decline is attributable to student loan debt.”
In many cases, the pandemic has only exacerbated housing inequality across the country, as approximately 34 million people are at risk of being evicted. However, home sales have skyrocketed in the past year because, as the Washington Post reported, Americans who have savings, stable jobs and good credit scores are taking advantage of the cheapest mortgage rates ever recorded to haggle for a bigger house. (tie when you are distancing yourself socially and cannot leave).
In July, new mortgage applications reached a level never seen since 2008 and, as real estate agent James Dietsche told the publication, “People are literally trying to get back to a suburban home with a yard and a fence. These are the houses that are out of the market in two seconds. ”
The pandemic has also caused people living in more densely populated urban centers to contemplate what it would be like to move to this type of suburban home with a backyard, and what their city rents could do when applied to a smaller city mortgage – which perhaps it has become the hottest real estate fantasy.
Something that “SNL” writers obviously know very well.
“I would never live in North Carolina,” said Dan Levy during the sketch with a seductive smile. “But if I did, I could buy a big, disgusting mansion.”