Estate Agent Simulator Preview

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing a lot of hate hurled at the real estate industry of late. Not just in the merry land of England, but in my country, Australia. For a little context, between the interest rate hikes (estimated to decrease in 2025) and the cost of living skyrocketing as major supermarket chains have been caught price gouging, an already struggling rental/homebuyer market has properties with half the walls destroyed being sold for just under half a million.

Estate Agent Simulator, developed and published by KiKi Games, foregoes realism for a more fanciful lifestyle set on a small map consisting of a main road, a suburb, a few stores, and a casino. The game starts with selecting some crucial options: first, the difficulty and length of the day/night cycle; next, you and your wife’s avatars, which look like supermodels.

Every agent’s profile picture emanates what the kids are calling nowadays ‘Rizz’, best described to us oldies as the ‘Blue Steel’ look, so I chose my avatar, Shaun, for his balanced skill level in money, trade, luck, and speed. The wife avatars don’t fare any better; without any skill levels, it’s boiled down to whichever is the hottest. Before this review becomes a Polygon article summarised as ‘videogames make women appear as objects’, the fantasy of playing as a good-looking real estate agent with a wife in general might not be yours — or mine — but is for someone else. In that case, I picked Emma for her ‘psychology major’ aesthetic.

I was then plopped into an upstairs room with a queen-sized bed pushed to a wall, a cheap desk and chair combo, and a singular lamp with the prompt ‘open the briefcase and take the money’ like a directive from a mobster. Opening the case, I picked up $40 thousand to begin my career. Going downstairs, the beginning house has a basic kitchen in the back, a bathroom, and a lounge room. With a briefcase full of cash, I did the sensible thing and went to the casino to double it.

Before leaving, I saw my wife, and she did not look like her picture. Estate Agent Simulator isn’t visually pleasing, to say it nicely. The graphics are similar to Big Ambitions; assets like furniture and vehicles are detailed enough to look nice from a distance, while the character models look like they walked out of an original Xbox title. To be fair, I know KiKi Games is an indie company, the game is still in development, and they are advertising future activities like hunting and boxing in-game, but I’m saying what I see.

Taking the bus to the casino, a flashing neon sign over a brick building met me. Next to the venue was a middle-aged guy and his muscle car. Heading inside, the sounds of slot machines ringing and the chatter of people hit me when I stepped in. Besides the furniture store and car dealership, the casino, furnished to the brim and displaying a tonne of activity in the township, circulates around gambling (as well as other things I’ll talk about later).

Saving before sitting down at the blackjack table, I gambled and reloaded saves until I made a sizable amount of winnings to afford to buy a few houses. But first, I had to go home and sleep. Alongside having to pay taxes and rent on your properties, you also have to balance a hunger and relationship meter. Buying junk food from vending machines near bus stops helps with the former, while spending quality time with your wife will increase the latter.

The next day, I went house hunting. I didn’t have to go far, as next to the casino I saw a lady in white lingerie standing on the sidewalk. Available houses have someone waiting in front of the property stamped with a big, red sign saying, ‘REALTOR WANTED’. Interacting with her, she asked for over 90 grand for a two-storey house. After a few days, I decided to haggle the price down to $85 thousand and bought my first home. However, when I entered the house, I was met with a pigsty. Equipped with a sponge and bug spray available at the start of the game, I picked up trash, scrubbed stains off the walls, and killed cockroaches as I swept the house of any muck and marks.

After admiring my work and counting the number of rooms, I went shopping for furniture. There are two ways of buying furnishings: either going to the store near the suburb or outbidding people at the storage auctions. Shopping outright lets you purchase the furniture you want with the provision that everything will be dumped out front for you to pick up and place in your car individually. As some assets around the building are hollow, I spend some time looking for a chair, only to find it hiding inside a car.

Auctions are more of a gamble for what you’re getting, but they can be cheaper than the store. After playing for a bit, I decided to only use auctioned furniture in my rentals, as I don’t like having to go hunting around for my purchases. With four containers to bid on each week and money meant nothing to me after a few trips to the casino, I unloaded the containers placed outside my house and loaded them into my truck to head off for the property down the street.

I had no issues unloading, moving, and placing assets down, but when I went upstairs to set up the bedroom, the bed got stuck in the roof vertically — an issue I only had twice. Furnishing homes is done to boost the price of the rental, but the placement of the furniture can be anywhere inside the home.

Next, I took some photos of the house with my tablet, which is used to advertise and sell homes on the market and posted them up for a cheap $13 thousand a day. After driving to the real estate office (located near my house), I leased it out to a man for 16 days, making a bit of a profit in the long run. I went home after a long day working and watched a slideshow of AI-generated images depicting the story of Half-Life with my wife before we went to bed.

There are aspects of Estate Agent Simulator that I did not try out, like racing, owning a dog, and hiring assistants and a lawyer, as I didn’t need to interact with them to do the basic legwork in the game. However, from the skill trees, assistants help with collecting rent so you don’t have to drive down to get it from each renter; the dog is a pet you can play with (duh), but I don’t know what the lawyer does yet.

As I said before, the game is still in development, and some things I’ve talked about in this preview may change or get tweaked for the user experience. I’m interested in what Estate Agent Simulator will look like this time next year.