By Monica Radu

I have a confession: I look up people’s houses on Zillow.

You might think we’re exchanging addresses so I can send you a Christmas card. Sure, maybe a Christmas card is coming. But there is also a very good chance I’m going to Zillow. How much did you pay for your house? What is it worth now? How many bedrooms do you have? When was it built? Oh, you remodeled the kitchen? I love it!

Why do I do this? I don’t know! Part of it is simple curiosity. Looking at houses is fun. I’m also a sociologist, which means apparently, I cannot stop observing people even in my free time. And Zillow has made it far too easy to be nosy from the comfort of my own couch.

But there is also a sociological reason I find all of this so interesting. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly gathering information about other people and using it to make assumptions about who they are, including assumptions about their social class.

How Do We Know Someone’s Social Class?

When I teach social class to undergraduate students, I like to ask them a simple question: How can you tell someone’s social class?

Think about walking around a college campus. You probably do not know how much money the person sitting next to you in class has in their bank account. You do not know their parents’ income. You probably do not know whether their family owns a home, rents an apartment, has significant investments, or is carrying substantial debt. Yet we still make assumptions about social class.

I ask my students what cues they use when making those assumptions, and they usually come up with plenty of examples. They mention the clothes someone wears, the way a person speaks, the phone they carry, the laptop they bring to class, if they have a car and what kind they drive, where they go on breaks, or even what they do on weekends.

All of these little clues matter because we give them meaning. Symbolic interactionism focuses on the meanings we attach to people, objects, and interactions in everyday life. A new MacBook is not simply a computer. A particular car, handbag, pair of shoes, or spring break destination can communicate something to the people around us because we have collectively attached meanings to those things. They become symbols, and sometimes we interpret those symbols as signs of social class.

Then I ask my students another question: Have you ever been wrong?

Almost always, the answer is yes. The problem is that many of the symbols we associate with social class do not necessarily tell us a person’s actual economic circumstances.

Which brings me back to Zillow.

Zillow Makes Social Class Feel More Visible

Housing feels different because, for many Americans, a home is both the largest purchase they will ever make and their biggest source of wealth. But the ability to casually look up what someone else’s house is worth hasn’t always been part of everyday life.

Zillow helped change that when it launched in 2006, putting home-value estimates and other property information within easy reach of the public. The site drew more than a million visitors in just its first three days, and the surge in interest was enough to temporarily crash the site.

Of course, Zillow is only one part of a much larger shift in how visible other people’s homes—and their price tags—have become. Housing information now shows up everywhere, from social media to news and entertainment sites. Celebrity real estate, in particular, has practically become its own category of entertainment.

Take Kylie Jenner. In 2026, headlines appeared when she listed her longtime Hidden Hills mansion for more than $20 million. She purchased the home in 2016 for about $12 million. We got photos, square footage, details about the bedrooms, pool, theater, gym, and even the closets. When the asking price was later reduced, that became news too. There is something fascinating about seeing how other people live, whether it is Kylie Jenner in a multimillion-dollar mansion or someone we know whose address we happen to have.

Twenty years after Zillow launched, looking up a house takes only a few seconds. I can type in an address and potentially see what someone paid for their home, when they bought it, its estimated value today, property details, photographs, and sometimes its entire sales history.

In some ways, all of this can make social class seem easier to see than it actually is. If someone’s house is worth $800,000, for example, it can be tempting to assume we know quite a bit about their financial situation. And there is a reason housing can seem like such a powerful indicator of social class.

Where we live can affect the schools our children attend, the employment opportunities nearby, exposure to environmental hazards, neighborhood safety, and access to transportation, health care, grocery stores, parks, and many other resources.

Sociologists often use the concept of life chances to describe the opportunities people have to access valued resources and experiences in society. Where a person lives can shape those opportunities in significant ways. This is one reason ZIP code can tell researchers so much about patterns of inequality. But recognizing the relationship between housing and social class is different from assuming that the price of someone’s house tells us their entire financial story.

A $600,000 House Does Not Necessarily Mean a $600,000 Lifestyle

Imagine two families who live next door to one another in nearly identical houses currently valued at $600,000. One family bought their house 25 years ago for $175,000. The other purchased theirs last year for $600,000 with a large mortgage. Their houses may look the same on Zillow, but their financial situations could be dramatically different.

Someone might have inherited a house from a parent or grandparent. A family member may have provided the down payment. Someone might have purchased a neglected fixer-upper years before the neighborhood became desirable and done much of the renovation themselves. A homeowner may have benefited from rapidly increasing property values even though their income has not increased at the same rate. An older adult might live in a home now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while surviving on a modest, fixed income.

There are also people who are “house poor,” meaning a large portion of their income goes toward housing expenses, leaving much less money available for everything else. Someone else might own a relatively modest home outright and have substantial savings and investments.

Divorce, inheritance, job loss, medical expenses, debt, interest rates, the timing of a home purchase, family assistance, and plain old luck can all affect the relationship between the value of someone’s house and their actual financial circumstances.

Zillow can show us the house. It cannot show us all of that.

Social Class Is More Complicated Than What We Can See

This is one of the reasons social class is so interesting sociologically. We often think we can see it. Sometimes, we can see pieces of it. But what we observe on the surface rarely tells us everything we would need to know about someone’s class position.

Researchers often measure socioeconomic status using factors such as income, education, and occupation. Wealth adds another important dimension because what someone owns minus what they owe can tell a very different story than income alone.

A person can earn a high salary and have little accumulated wealth. Someone else can have a relatively modest income but substantial inherited wealth. Two people earning exactly the same salary may have completely different financial lives if one entered adulthood with family assistance and no student loans while the other supports relatives and carries significant debt. Much of that complexity is invisible to the people around us.

Behind every Zillow estimate there is a story about how someone came to live there.

The next time you pass a beautiful house, notice a classmate’s new laptop, or find yourself scrolling through a home listing, think about the meanings we attach to those things. What might they tell us about social class? What might they leave out?

That is one of the things I love about sociology: even something as ordinary as looking at houses can give us a new way to think about the social world around us.