When listings start to feel like a game

Hey cuz,

Something starts to feel off pretty quickly, when you begin scrolling through online listings in Korea.

Photos, price, location, all good. So you call. And suddenly you’re talking about something else. After a few rounds, it hits you.

“Are they just trying to get me on the phone?”

Kinda. But not merely bait-and-switch.

The strange part is the listing itself often isn’t the real destination. It’s more like the start of the curation. Once you’re on the line, the matching starts.

What they have.
What nearby offices have.
What might be on the way.
What's flexible in a different deal bucket.

That’s why things didn’t line up clean. You asked about one place. You end up hearing about another.

I remember it started feeling personal at first. But then I noticed calls getting made behind the scenes. Photos getting exchanged. Other offices getting pulled in.

The listing was never really the whole thing. But it wasn’t fully catfishing either. It shortened the sitting and scrolling time.

More importantly, it opened a line into the real network behind the listings.

Stay steady,
--JK

P.S. The listings make a lot more sense once you stop treating them like a clean inventory catalogue.
Search Pregame is basically about learning how this whole layer underneath actually moves.