When Rebecca Kornman was a student at Kenyon College, she and some of her friends picked up a voyeuristic hobby. Using the Ohio liberal arts school’s student directory, they found students’ home addresses and looked them up on Zillow to see how much their families’ homes cost.
“It became a kind of controversial thing that people were talking about,” says Kornman, 25. While some found it endlessly entertaining to dive into the finances of a student body where almost one in five students come from families in the top 1 percent, the popular pastime struck a nerve with a particular crowd.
“People would always frame it as, ‘Well, you shouldn't do that, because some people are embarrassed about where they live.’” But she found out that one of the main crusaders against the resource was a student who grew up in a multimillion-dollar home in SoHo, Manhattan. And another student who, she says, was “outwardly saying that they were broke and they grew up in poverty” was just one Zillow search away from being found out. “Someone was like, ‘Bro, go on the directory. They live in a brownstone, a five-story brownstone.’”
“I think it's definitely more taboo the more money you have,” Kornman says. “You're all on the same page when you're in college. And so to differentiate each other, especially if someone's going out of their way to maybe obscure some of the facts of their life, it gives you good perspective.”
Zillow, the hugely popular and addictive real-estate platform launched in 2006, has gone from simply a tool to buy and sell homes to a full-fledged phenomenon. It’s used by 227 million unique visitors every month and had 2.4 billion visits in just the first quarter of 2025. (The company has such a vice-grip on real estate listings, it was recently sued by Compass for its alleged attempted monopoly on online home listings.) Turns out, it owes its mass appeal, in part, to nosy people looking to satisfy their undying curiosity about their peers’ financial lives.
When you look up an address on Zillow, a Zestimate—Zillow’s estimate of a given property’s current value—appears below photos of the property. It’s calculated using “millions of data points” including public records, MLS (multiple listing service) feeds, tax assessments, recent sales, and updates provided directly from homeowners, according to Claire Carroll, a spokesperson for Zillow. Carroll says the estimates are fairly accurate, with a median error rate nationwide of just under 2 percent for on-market homes and 7 percent for off-market homes. The price history, which includes dates of past sales with corresponding prices, is sourced through public property records, county tax assessors, and local MLS. Zillow also provides an estimation of monthly rent for rental units.
Zillow does not give users the option to hide their home’s Zestimate and price history. “Open access to this kind of public information is a really important part of a fair housing market,” says Amanda Pendleton, Zillow’s home trends expert. But while not everyone is thrilled with having the value and cost of their home on full display for anyone who’s curious, others take full advantage of the publicity of this information by actively searching for the details of their friends’ housing costs—and some are extrapolating Zillow’s figures to get a fuller picture of their friends’ financial situations.