Lifestyle, opportunity and attraction images: real estate platforms and the digital remediation of space

Searching for and selling real estate in Australia and worldwide changed this century with the proliferation of web and mobile platforms for real estate, now often known as Realtech. These platforms offer enticing images of homes as commodities, emphasizing desirable lifestyles and opportunities for renovation and capital gains. In comparison with previous advertising media, real estate platforms powerfully mediate spatiality, mobilizing attraction images that intensify the experience of house hunting. Maps and floorplans, photos and videos, drone shots and 3D walkthroughs, algorithms and interaction design present buyers with complex but not unified impressions of space and place. This article provides a critical history of these changes in the cultural field of real estate in Australia with the rise of the platforms Domain and realestate.com.au. It connects these sociotechnical and industrial changes with the influence of neo-liberal ideology and the framing of homes as commodities. Through a textual, visual, spatial and content analysis of online real estate advertising in three contrasting suburbs in Sydney, Australia, it observes the intensification of three dominant strategies for promoting real estate: the lifestyle image, the opportunity image, and the attraction image. It shows how these images vary across geography, class and subculture.