I’m not proud to admit that I love property as entertainment, especially smooth-brained “reality” shows in which peptide-plumped, pilates-honed NYC Amazons in towering Louboutins scrap over commission on Upper West Side condos. It’s a world where make-believe sums of money are bandied around, drama is manufactured, people say “I’m super excited” without any part of their preternaturally glossy faces moving and every surface is Carrara marble. I’m never more at peace than when I’m slumped under a crisp-strewn blanket, muttering “that’s hideous” at a $26m (£19m) penthouse.
Inevitably, social media cottoned on to my proclivities and now offers me endless real estate content. I appreciate the aspirational stuff: the Modern House (brutalism but make it chic), Inigo (for people with a cornicing kink), and Parisian internet “personality” @ZacharyMaille with his alarming blazers and Eiffel Tower views. And who doesn’t enjoy wondering why castles cost less than Sydenham semis (because they’re riddled with dry rot, haunted, and two hours from the nearest Spar, presumably)?
But recently bog-standard British estate agents have started appearing in my feed in their best suits, presenting properties best described as “fine, I suppose”. Standing on damp gravel under leaden skies, a middle-aged man who is definitely not Manhattan super-agent Ryan Serhant tries to hype up a 1960s cube in a Yorkshire cul-de-sac. In Clapham, another man with a jaunty pocket square holds a tiny mic as he enthuses over a “starter home” with a stained carpet and not a hint of an infinity pool.
They just keep coming. Given the power and perspicacity of the algorithm, I assume it has my number and is offering me the property content I deserve, but as the kids say, it’s not giving. If you’re entering this genre, making the agents part of the story, please respect its conventions. Give me teacup dogs in Hermès Birkins, massive watches and body-con dresses; give me gratuitously bare-chested negotiations (men), or feuds conducted on pilates reformer machines in crop tops (women). I need martinis to be thrown and glossy hair pulled with “milky French tip” nails. I don’t care if you’re selling a buy-to-let in Beaconsfield – let me dream, or get out of my feed.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
