At a recent open house a woman told me she looks at real estate listings every day. She’s not actively looking for a home. She bought the home she lives in not too long ago. She just looks at real estate listings every day.

She was smart. She knew a lot about real estate. She laughed when I told her she’d make a good REALTOR®. She doesn’t want to be a REALTOR®, though. She just looks at real estate listings every day.

She’s far from alone in this. It seems like everyone I know looks at real estate listings every day.

Like many modern habits, looking at real estate listings every day seems normal now, so commonplace that younger people might not even remember a time before everyone looked at real estate listings every day. But I can tell you from personal experience that there was a time within living memory when basically no one looked at real estate listings every day.

You don’t even have to go back that far, only fifteen or twenty years. Before anyone had a smartphone nobody looked at real estate listings every day.

Back then in the before time, if you wanted to look at real estate listings you had to look at the black and white ads in the back of the newspaper (the “classifieds”). Or get the Real Estate News from the free box outside the Real Estate Office. Of course you could also go into the Real Estate Office. But then you might have to talk to a Real Estate Agent, a totally unpredictable situation that might lead to all sorts of awkwardness. You might end up buying a house!

Like all technical “advances”, getting detailed, full color photographs and 3D tours of houses on your “phone” is presented as an unalloyed good. How could more information be bad for consumers?

To make sense of this we have to stop for a second and ask ourselves what it means to be a consumer of housing.

On one level the purpose of real estate listings is straightforward: to encourage potential buyers to buy this particular property. And since almost every buyer now discovers their home on the internet, it seems the images serve this purpose well enough.

But what about the people who are consuming real estate listings every day? People who are consuming hundreds or thousands of images without any intention of buying a home?

What are these images doing to them? What are they for?

The Tenth Commandment tells us not to covet our neighbour’s goods, including his house. A common nugget of self-help wisdom suggests that it is impossible to feel depressed when you’re feeling grateful. Accepting these two premises as correct (the one has a noble pedigree, the other seems like common sense), they also seem closely related. In fact, I’d say it’s the same idea from different directions.

We covet other people’s homes when we’re dissatisfied with our own. When we’re dissatisfied with our own we’re unavoidably ungrateful.

This is not to say that one should never buy a new house. Or that we have to stay in the same house forever if that house doesn’t serve us. Some houses are nicer than others. Everyone knows this because everyone looks at real estate listings every day.

But it’s obvious that a “nicer” house or a fancy house or any kind of house that is not the house we live in now is not a guarantee of greater peace, happiness, or wellbeing.

If this were the case, there would be no happy, peaceful, contented people anywhere in the world who had “worse” housing than North America in 2026. And we know this to be false.

If this were true then no one was happy, at peace, or contented before the invention of the ensuite spa shower. Or Fisher & Paykel appliances. Or that godforsaken subway tile. And we know this to be false.

Something is making people look at real estate listings every day. And if this entity had our best interests at heart we would all feel much better for it.

And yet…

we know this to be false…