Smartphones are basically magic at this point, especially the system on chip type devices.
Computers had, and mostly still have, a bunch of discrete components you could identify, smartphones are a tiny magic box on a board, with everything else connected to it. The photos they take are amazing, too.
It's weird reading work by authors like Asimov, where people travel between planets as a matter of routine, and we have sentient robots, but not mobile phones.
One issue with the holiday home thing, they tend to be in quite remote places where there are very few job opportunities, because that's where people go on holiday.
What's so difficult to believe about this? Why would it be fake?