When Real Estate and Reality TV Collide
Leave it to television to drive a point home.
With the housing boom that has gripped the nation for the past five years finally fizzling, we are left with nothing to do but watch. Rising Florida mortgage rates may be throwing some cold water on our home buying options, but our collective lust for land remains… and has morphed into a strange new obsession. Instead of shopping for a house ourselves, we’ve taken to watching other people do so… on the tube.
HGTV has had surprising success with “House Hunters” and “What You Get for the Money,” while “Location, Location, Location” on BBC America follows people in search of real estate as well. If you get tired of house hunting and want a change of pace, well, you can watch other people on the other side of the real estate game try to unload their homes. HGTV’s “Designed to Sell” and A&E’s “Sell This House” and “Flip This House” (not to be confused with TLC’s “Flip That House”) take a look inside the lives of homeowners trying to sell.
“These shows are not really for people that are going to buy and sell a home. They’re for people who have a fantasy of buying and selling a home,” said Jeffrey Sconce, Associate Professor at Northwestern University.
We’ve moved beyond the remodeling / makeover mania of a few years ago, when everyone was “Trading Spaces.” In the past year, about 20 new real estate shows have appeared on HGTV, Fine Living, Discovery Home, A&E and TLC. Averaging nearly a million viewers per episode, “House Hunters” is the most popular. The greedier “Flip This House” is a close second, with an average of 802,000 viewers per episode.
These are big numbers for low-budget cable TV shows. Why are they so popular? They’re Real Estate Lite: An arduous process condensed into easy-to-digest, made-for-TV clips. Check one of these shows out sometime and you will not see much of the following…
- Stomping around scary-looking “fixer-uppers.”
- Scoping out moldy bathrooms.
- Negotiating back and forth. Repeat. Again.
- Turning up your nose at a rehabbed kitchen.
- Signing reams of paperwork.
- Waiting for the Realtor to call you with good news: You’ve been outbid!
Never mind the softening market. Americans are obsessed.
“All of America right now is having a love affair with real estate,” says New York real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group.
Almost 70 percent of Americans are homeowners. With millions of people talking about their property appreciation, it was just a matter of time before the Reality TV descended on real estate. Let’s face it, watching others struggle can be compelling. Maybe not edge-of-your-seat viewing, but if you’re surfing and happen to find one of these shows, you can get sucked in.
“Real estate lends itself very, very well to television. It touches people. It’s storytelling at its best,” HGTV President Judy Girard said. “It’s a framework where people are bringing their lives, their hearts and souls into buying a house or selling a house.”
While window-shopping, couch-sitting audiences for these real estate shows are small compared with network TV, they attract the middle class viewers that advertisers desire. Hence, viewers are treated to a bevy commercials for Home Depot and more spots for Benjamin Moore paints than you can shake a brush at. In 2004, HGTV had two real estate shows. Now three of its top five shows fall into that category, and the network plans to add four more within the next year, including “International House Hunters.”
“A lot of people go to open houses,” said Vincent Hurteau, a D.C. real estate broker and president of Continental Properties, who is also shopping his own real estate show idea. “They love to see how other people live. And they love to know what things cost. Open houses are a way to that. Now they can do that on TV.”
Maybe we have been going about it all wrong with this Internet thing. Coming soon to a cable channel near you: Florida Home Loan TV!
