Australians Already Look at Property for Fun

Australia does not really treat property as a normal consumer category. We browse homes we have no intention of buying, argue about auction results, watch entire television seasons built around renovations, and can turn a change to housing tax into a national conversation almost overnight. Property sits somewhere between shelter, investment, aspiration, identity and sport... which is why a small real estate game I came across last week may be more relevant to Australian agents than it first appears.

PriceMe describes itself as a social real estate playground. Its daily puzzle gives players six attempts to guess the price of an interesting property, while its Chicago-based Classic mode asks them to estimate the recent sale prices of three local homes. There are also over-or-under and side-by-side formats, leaderboards, social sharing and a community built around comparing results. According to the company, more than 230,000 people have already tested their property knowledge on the site.

At first glance it looks like a clever diversion for people who spend too much time looking at listings. The behaviour underneath it is more useful than that. PriceMe has taken something people already do informally, guessing what a home is worth, and turned it into a repeatable product. The player is learning the market, noticing properties, comparing suburbs, sharing a result and coming back for another round. None of that requires them to be an active buyer on the day they open the game.

PriceMe is still a small experiment, and its strongest local mode is confined to Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Zillow Gone Wild shows what the same underlying behaviour can become at cultural scale. Samir Mezrahi started the social account in 2020 because there was nowhere online to talk about the strange, ambitious and occasionally ridiculous properties he kept finding. By June 2025 it had more than 2.1 million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million on Facebook, and the idea had already become an HGTV television series. The third season is now airing in the United States.

Most of that audience is looking at homes for entertainment. Zillow Gone Wild turned that idle property browsing into a media brand, a community and a television franchise. Architectural Digest has even profiled buyers who found and purchased homes after seeing them featured on the account, while agents quoted elsewhere have reported serious buyer interest arriving after a listing went viral. Casual attention does not always stay casual.

Australia feels unusually well suited to this kind of discovery. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare describes home ownership as a widely held national aspiration, with 67% of households owning their home outright or with a mortgage at the 2021 Census. It also says the mean price of Australian residential dwellings more than doubled between December 2011 and December 2024. Add The Block, Grand Designs, auction culture, renovation content, suburb comparisons and the amount of household wealth tied up in housing, and it is hardly surprising that Australians keep watching property even when they are not actively transacting.

In recent issues I have written about Google, ChatGPT, agency websites and pre-market inventory changing where the property journey begins. I have described it as a 'Barnes & Noble versus Amazon' moment for the portals, because the dominant businesses can remain large and profitable while the habit around them is rebuilt somewhere else.

REA has now placed live realestate.com.au listings inside ChatGPT, and its own support material says many Australians are starting their property journey in AI tools. PriceMe and Zillow Gone Wild add another route into the same broader change. Discovery can begin through search, conversation, private inventory, social media, curiosity, community or play, and the portal becomes one part of a wider journey rather than the automatic first step every time.

For agents, buyer discovery is vendor work. An agent is being paid to expose a property to the best available audience, create competition and help the owner achieve the strongest result the market will support. When buyers and future buyers are spending time in different places and engaging with property in different formats, the agency has to follow that behaviour rather than assume every serious journey will begin with a portal search.

That does not require every agent to build a national media company. A local agency could run a weekly guess-the-sale-price challenge, an over-or-under auction result, a suburb-versus-suburb comparison, a renovation potential series, or a simple question about which of two homes sold for more. An unusual listing can be treated as a story rather than another set of specifications. A post-sale campaign can explain why one property outperformed another, giving locals a reason to participate while demonstrating the agent’s market knowledge at the same time.

Handled properly, those formats can do more than generate likes. They can build a repeat local audience, bring past clients back into view, surface people who are watching particular suburbs or property types, and create a reason for homeowners to engage before they are ready to request an appraisal.

A well-designed price game can also produce, with proper consent, useful first-party signals around location, value expectations and property preferences. People arrive because the format is enjoyable, then the agency gradually learns what they are interested in from the way they choose to participate and gives them a reason to stay connected.

There is a seller-discovery angle here as well. The people who enjoy guessing sale prices, tracking renovation results and comparing one street with another are often homeowners paying close attention to the value of their own property. They may be a long way from listing, though they are already displaying the behaviour agents usually hope to create through generic market updates. A recurring local format can make the agent part of that habit well before the appraisal conversation begins.

It could also become terrible content very quickly. The weak interpretation is forced humour, agents dancing through listings, clickbait and properties being reduced to props. The stronger version keeps market knowledge, local context and respect for the vendor at the centre, then packages that information in a way people actually want to engage with.

PriceMe appears to work because people genuinely enjoy testing their pricing instincts. Zillow Gone Wild works because homes carry story, taste, personality and occasional absurdity. Neither requires the audience to be treated like an idiot.

REA still has an enormous audience and remains central to Australian property campaigns. Agencies can use that reach while also building channels that compound over time. The ACCC investigation into REA Group remains at an early stage, with no conclusion reached, though the regulator has said it wants to ensure strong competition in the real estate sector. For agents and vendors, the broader concern around pricing and concentration is familiar enough. Every campaign that depends almost entirely on portal distribution begins by buying access to the audience again.

Owned formats work differently. A local game, social series, newsletter, buyer community or genuinely useful content franchise can keep building between campaigns. The audience may begin with a curious neighbour, a renovation addict or someone who likes guessing auction results, then become a buyer, seller, landlord, referrer or future appraisal client months later. That relationship belongs more directly to the agency, provided the agency has built somewhere useful for it to continue.

PriceMe may remain a clever niche product, and Zillow Gone Wild benefits from unusual homes that naturally travel further on social media. Even so, both expose an opportunity that feels particularly relevant here. Australian agents already sit on the raw material... listings, sale results, buyer reactions, renovation stories, suburb knowledge and a public that cannot stop talking about property. Most of it is still packaged as an advertisement only after a home comes to market.

Agencies that begin turning some of that material into useful entertainment can build attention before the campaign, keep it after the sale and rely a little less on buying the same audience back from the portals each time.

Australia already treats property as a national pastime. The next discovery advantage may belong to the agents who finally start treating that attention as an asset.