How a listing drifts

Look at flat listings in north Jeddah over a few years and you can watch a standard move.

At first an agent uses a wide lens, so the living room looks a little larger than it is. Everyone does it, and buyers half expect it. Then the photos get brighter, and the building next door is cropped out. Then "sea view" appears on a flat where the sea can be seen from one corner of one balcony, if you lean. Then a listing shows the show flat on the ground floor instead of the unit for sale on the sixth.

No agent woke up one morning and decided to mislead people. Each step was small, and each was taken because the listings around it had taken it already. The line moved, the agents moved with it, and it never felt like a decision.

Then one day a young agent finds himself typing "five minutes from the beach" about a building twenty minutes away in traffic, and something in him stops. He reads it back and does not recognise the person who wrote it.

That moment is worth trusting. The useful question is blunt: if nobody around me did this, would I? Did I believe in it before the people around me started doing it?

Standards rarely collapse. They slide, a little at a time, under the weight of what everyone nearby treats as normal. A crowd that rewards going one step further than last month will keep asking for one more.

The protection is not stubbornness. It is remembering what you held to before the competition began, and letting that count for more than this month's enquiries.