by wes

It usually starts as something innocent. You’re killing time in line at the post office, on a train headed nowhere special, or in bed with one eye open and sleep still clinging to your lashes. You swipe open Domain or realestate.com.au, just for a quick scroll. You’re not buying. You’re not even pretending to be. But fifteen minutes later you’re deep into a $3.4 million listing in Bronte, calculating how far the plunge pool is from the master bedroom, like it’s something that might one day matter to you.

You’re not alone. Real estate browsing has become a cultural pastime. It’s our version of lifestyle voyeurism. We don’t just look at houses anymore. We imagine lives inside them. Some people stream shows about home makeovers or million-dollar listings. Others, like us, curate wishlists of properties we’ll never inspect. It’s soothing. Or maybe it’s a bit sinister. Hard to tell.

In my case, this is literally my job. I spend hours inside listings. I analyse floor plans, scroll through drone shots, write about property like it’s a form of philosophy. And yet, even I catch myself deep in the fantasy. Last week I was knee-deep in a ten-acre vineyard just outside Perth, imagining a life of wine, solitude, and kangaroos. It wasn’t for a client. It was just… there. And I followed it.

It’s not that different from my TikTok obsession, to be honest. That same urge to check out, to drift into someone else’s curated world, to feel temporarily transported. Only in this case, instead of dance trends or food hacks, I’m watching a 1960s weatherboard in regional Victoria get a $450k makeover.

For years, I told myself this habit was research. That’s what I called it. I’d say I was “just staying informed.” But truthfully, it was more like digital daydreaming. A break from bills, decisions, and the limitations of my own postcode. One swipe and I was a vineyard owner in the Adelaide Hills. The next, I was living alone in a brutalist apartment in Potts Point, waking up to concrete walls and curated silence.

The homes don’t even have to be nice. Sometimes they’re bizarre, wildly over-renovated, or architecturally confused. But that just adds texture to the fantasy. Even doom-scrolling real estate taps into something primal. This yearning for control, security, beauty, space. We want to be inspired, yes, but also reassured. The dream is still out there, right? If I just had the right deposit. If interest rates shifted. If I moved further out.

It’s not that different from other types of online distraction, except this one’s socially acceptable. You tell someone you’re looking at houses, and they nod like you’re goal-oriented. Focused. No one suspects you’re half an hour deep into a listing for a fixer-upper in Daylesford, trying to picture how you’d redo the kitchen in sage green.

There’s no harm in it, I suppose. But there’s also a risk. That we spend more time chasing imagined lives than building the one we’re actually in. That we start to see homes less as shelter and more as status. That the simple act of living well, of being content, gets replaced by an endless hunger for more. More land, more light, more polish.

So, I’m trying to be more honest with myself. If I scroll, I admit what I’m doing. I’m dreaming. I’m window-shopping a life. And that’s okay. As long as I don’t start mistaking the scroll for the story. Because the real story, my story, is happening here. Not in a browser tab.