Pretend renovations, houses you’ll never buy: the therapeutic benefits of real-estate fantasies
4 min
Ellisha Caplan has exercised , maintained a healthy diet and gotten sleep to manage stress. Lately she’s found something that makes her feel even better: Zillow.
In spare moments, the 47-year-old consultant in Delaware searches real-estate websites for homes in her price range in Philadelphia, where she went to college, and in the small German town where her family has spent several idyllic summers. She looks up nearby restaurants and bike trails, too, imagining her life if she retired there.
“It’s calming, like a massage for my brain,” Caplan says. “I get to let my mind run awhile and just go with the flow.”
Rising prices, few options and high mortgage rates have made home buying uniquely painful right now. But make-believe house hunts are different. They transport people out of their current problems into a fantasy of a better future, a relaxing habit one fantasiser likens to a “digital glass of wine.” I call it Zillow therapy.
Trawling Zillow for alternate versions of your life isn’t the same thing as gawking at real-estate porn, memorably captured in this “ Saturday Night Live ” skit. People using Zillow for therapeutic reasons tend to focus on a specific place, perusing homes they think they can afford and imagining life there. Down the rabbit hole, they cruise Google Maps and local websites for bars, hiking trails or—guilty as charged—bookstores and libraries.
“The fantasy is sustaining,” says Giulia Poerio, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, in the U.K., who studies how daydreaming can help regulate our emotional well-being. “Even if you can’t get what you need right now, you can Zillow it and get a little bit of energy or hope to keep you going.”
In reporting this column, I heard from people whose Zillow fantasies focus on homes with large backyards, where kids and dogs can romp outside unsupervised, and on places with a detached studio for writing or drawing. Nostalgia powers lots of people’s searches: They look at homes in a childhood town or another place they lived when life seemed simpler. Others use their daydreams to identify what’s missing from their current lives, such as community or nature.
My Zillow therapy sessions centre on Seattle . It’s far from hurricane season in Miami, where I live. I have a close friend there. And there’s plenty of water where I can sail . I search for (and imagine renovating) homes near walking trails and marinas, with a room where I can write with a view of some magnificent trees. Instant Zen.
Looking at worse houses rather than better ones is a balm for some people. Unattractive or cramped homes make them feel better about where they currently live, especially if their own home is less expensive. Psychologists call this phenomenon downward social comparison.
“If you want to see the 900 square feet that $1.8 million can get you, just put in a San Francisco ZIP Code,” says Hooria Jazaieri, an assistant professor of management at Santa Clara University’s business school who studies how people regulate their emotions. “It’s a great way to make you feel grateful.”
Zillow is helping Bill Marklein, 39, get through an expensive kitchen remodel—he and his wife have a baby daughter and have been doing dishes in the bathtub for months. He browses listings in his price range within a 30-mile radius of his home in Plymouth, Wis., lingering on the kitchens. Nice ones make him feel good about his investment. But hideous ones with 1970s avocado-green cabinets or battered white refrigerators sticking out into the room cheer him up, too.
“It’s like having a digital glass of wine,” says the business owner. “It shows you that life isn’t so bad.”
Zillow’s user data suggests that plenty of us are doing this. The company’s real-estate websites and apps, which include Trulia and StreetEasy, have a combined 217 million average unique monthly users. Yet just slightly more than four million existing homes were sold in the U.S. last year, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Zillow is “not a replacement for therapy,” says the company’s home trends expert Amanda Pendleton, though it can give people an emotional boost.
“It’s a judgment-free zone,” she says. “Unlike on social media, no one is going to comment on the home you’re looking up and tell you it’s a terrible choice.”
Still, there are drawbacks to spending too much time in our imagination.
“The fantasies zap your energy,” says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University, who studies the psychology of motivation. Her research shows that while people who have positive fantasies about the future feel better in the moment, they often don’t achieve the goals they’re dreaming about. “Your attention is away from your current reality,” Oettingen says.
The solution, if you want to make your dream come true, is to identify the obstacle in the way of achieving your goal, she says. If you can’t move right now, accept that and choose a more immediate goal. Can’t buy a house in the seaside town your family vacationed in as a child? Plan a trip to the beach.
And if you’re serious about a future move, take steps to make it a reality down the road.
Elizabeth Uslander, 42, lives in San Diego but enjoys perusing house listings in small towns in the Colorado mountains to help her cope with the pressures of running a business and blending her family with her new husband’s. She looks for homes with direct access to nature and enough bedrooms for all, then researches how close they are from the ski slopes, shops and the local bar.
She shares her favourite listings with her husband, which she says is “like making drip castles in the sandbox with your bestie.” Recently, they found a home they like so much near Steamboat Springs that they visited it—and then bought it.
They have no plans to move right now but plan to visit often. Uslander says that just owning it makes her feel that her current stressors are temporary.
“I actually made the fantasy come to life,” she says.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
