Spend too much time scrolling Zillow on the T? Send countless listings to friends? If the answer is “yes,” there’s an app for that.
Househunt is a new mobile app from the viral social account-turned-TV-show "Zillow Gone Wild." The popular account (with 2.2 million Instagram followers) showing outrageous and quirky properties from around the country was turned into an HBO show hosted by Jack McBrayer in 2024. Season three debuted at the start of this month.
The latest Boston property to be featured on Zillow Gone Wild’s social accounts is a $6.3 million modern penthouse in the Back Bay’s historic Barrage Mansion with a hot tub outside the kitchen.
The new game allows players to simulate buying and selling properties in various cities around the United States and Canada, including Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, and Boston.
The Househunt game was developed by Closing Theory Studios, a three-year-old startup based in Austin, Texas. CEO Ankith Harathi said they observed that real estate sites like Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and others have over 100 million monthly active users, but fewer than 6 million real estate transactions happen in the United States each year.
“We learned people were dreaming about what houses they could buy if they had more money or lived in different cities,” said Harathi. “So we decided to make a game about real estate where you could buy your dream homes.”
The company reached out to “Zillow Gone Wild” to partner two years ago, and the collaboration launched on April 21.
“They’ve built such an amazing audience of people who view real estate as entertainment,” said Harathi.
Dubbed “Monopoly with real houses,” players pick a starting neighborhood. The local options are North Boston, Northeast Boston, and the North Shore.
“We used our general knowledge of the greater city to form the neighborhoods in the game,” said Harathi, who lived in Boston for six years. Closing Theory Studios cofounder and CTO Nitin Rajinkanth is from the Boston area.
Once a starting neighborhood is selected, the player takes virtual tours of real properties on the market and must guess the price of each based on images, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the square footage.
“We work with a network of providers — national and local brokerages, realtors, MLS, and real estate data companies — to get property data into the game,” Harathi said.
With each correct answer, the player gets in-game money to buy, sell, and renovate the houses. As players take more tours and make more money, they get access to new areas and towns such as the South Shore, Dorchester, Downtown Boston, Brookline, Southwest suburbs, MetroWest, Northwest suburbs, Cambridge/Somerville, and Waltham. The player accesses the leaderboards and tour houses in other cities as the game progresses.
Sam Shipman can be reached at sam.shipman@globe.com.