With Lust In Our Hearths

Like other reality makeover shows, many of HGTV's programs depend on the "before" being compellingly bad, so that the home's transformation is sufficiently dramatic. Inside HGTV, they call this "the oops factor," and it's one variable they manipulate to keep ratings high. When Burke began working on "House Hunters" in 2005, she helped discover another variable. As a newcomer, she found it annoying the show didn't tell viewers exactly what each house costs. So she decreed that if the show's guests wouldn't disclose what they paid, they couldn't appear. "You know what?" she says, smiling. "People would rather be on television than not say the price of their house." Once "House Hunters" began disclosing home prices, ratings soared; since then HGTV has created entire shows—like "My House Is Worth What?"—in which the drama comes from revealing the value of homes.

The appeal of these price-driven shows illustrates a broader fact: we're endlessly nosy, and thanks to the Web, there's far more openness about what our homes are worth. Consider Zillow.com, launched in 2006 by an Internet executive who was frustrated by his inability to find sales prices for homes in his neighborhood. Many users claim Zillow's estimates, based on tax information and a proprietary algorithm, are wildly off-base, but no matter: within weeks of its launch, Zillow was being used as a verb as friends Zillowed each other's homes. Bobbie Conti, a Seattle data analyst, recalls being surprised when a friend readily admitted to Zillowing her. "It wasn't this sheepish thing," Conti says. "I would have waited a while to admit it."

As the boom recedes into memory, it's easy to dismiss our exuberance for homes as a fad. Some aspects of the bubble have already faded. For instance, many of the half-million people who became real-estate agents will likely leave the profession. But in other ways, having lived through the real-estate boom will prove for some to be a life-altering experience, in the same way the dot-com era changed attitudes about the attractions of working for a start-up or being paid in stock options. After watching too many hours of "Flip That House," a lot of us will still devote weekends to executing home makeovers large or small. Even as the pain of the foreclosure crisis spreads, would-be investors still flock to auctions. Frazzled baby boomers who desperately seek a refuge from their 24/7 work lives continue to pine for a charming beachfront getaway. Our homes may no longer be making us rich, but living through a half-decade when we believed they would has changed our perspective. Even in a bust, House Lust lives on.

From House Lust: America’s Obsession With Our Homes by Daniel McGinn. Published by Currency Books/Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission.

© 2008