How real estate advertising can trigger 'status anxiety'

When I was a teenager and living at Umina on the NSW Central Coast, I had a neighbour called Violet. Every Sunday morning, Violet would change into her old clothes and dust the brown electricity meter box that hung off the side of the house.  

Then she’d go around her lawn with a can of Mister Sheen and polish all the gnomes and an extended family of concrete Mexicans. As the night fell, I’d be riding home on my dragster and spot her down on her hands and knees with a Dolphin Eveready in one hand, waging warfare with the army worms that attacked her perfect carpet of Buffalo Grass.

“When I die, I want people to say I had the loveliest house in the street,” Violet told my mother one day. “I want people to envy me.”

And envy her we did. Compared to our asbestos-fibro shacks, Violet’s three-bedroom brick veneer and tile LJ Hooker was a mansion.

“She’s up herself,” my father declared. He had never liked Violet after she complained about him parking his semi-trailer on her perfect verge. “Thinks she’s better than the rest of us.”

When Violet died, people did in fact say she had the best house in the street. They also said she was a stuck-up cow and they were glad she was in the ground.

The one thing you didn’t want to do in 1970s Umina – or in any working-class neighbourhood for that matter – was get above your station. No one wanted to be envied, because to be envied was to be hated.

But things have changed. If real estate copywriters are to be believed, being envied is something many of us desire.

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Just take a cursory reading of any real estate advert and hear the clarion call:

“Cooking on your very own five-burner gas oven will make you the envy of the neighbourhood,” screams the copy for a modest four-bedroom house in Cobar, NSW. Exactly how the neighbours will discover your shiny, fancy-pants oven is never quite explained.

Not content to confine yourself to the neighbourhood’s envy? An ad for a home in Medowie, NSW, promises you will “be the envy of all…”​

Real estate copywriters seem to believe that being envied is something many of us desire. Photo: Stocksy

That’s right… of ALL. Presumably, even hill tribes in New Guinea will be kicking themselves that they too don’t have tiled living areas, walk-in robes and a Hebel retaining wall.

PhilosopherAlain De Botton has coined this need to be envied, “status anxiety”. He believes the source of this anxiety is the need to be loved. So, when you find yourself gloating from your six-bedroom faux-Georgian manor with a media room, and Stencilcrete driveway, what you are really saying is: Love me, love my jet ski.

I’ve only ever been on the wrong side of envy once in my life and it wasn’t nice. In my early 20s I was a pretty successful suburban shopping mall model. I still have nightmares about strutting down the catwalk in Gosford’s Imperial Centre, dressed in the latest Lowes tracksuit, and being wolf-whistled by the local rugby league team. Envy can be a cruel mistress.

While real estate agents divide us into the envied and the envious, it may pay you to remember this. It was not so long ago that unless you were Louis XIV, or a Kardashian, ostentatious displays of wealth were considered vulgar.

Don’t compare your home with the neighbours’, focus on living the best life you can. Photo: Stocksy

When did it all change? When did we want people to envy our Iives?  

Social demographer Bernard Salt of The Demographics Group believes the only thing that has changed are our aspirations, and the rise of the Yuppie and Dink in the 1980s.

“These two groups emerged from aspirational Australia in the 1980s when we started to become richer,” says Salt. “This was the era when the three-bedroom brick veneer morphed within a decade to become the four-bedroom, two-bathroom McMansion.”

As for those real estate ads, Salt says they are simply trying to grab attention with their call to be envied. 

Shannan Whitney of Bresic Whitney agrees.

“We don’t use that sort of approach, ourselves,” says Whitney. “Real estate copywriting in Australia rarely has any impact because no one believes it. People know it’s all bullshit, they know it’s just a miserable attempt to fabricate something and so it just gets sillier and sillier and continues to create a genuine sense of distrust.”

As for my burgeoning modelling career? I couldn’t take that kind of envy in my life anymore and so I passed the reins to a young Gosford bloke named James Houston. He eventually abandoned the catwalk and became a world-famous photographer, living in New York.

And yeah, I absolutely hate him.