HGTV’s “House Hunters” is apparently not a real as “reality TV.” should be.
The show has a prospective buyer or buyers tour three properties, giving their critiques along the way on closet space, countertops and wall colors. At show's end, one home is chosen for purchase.
It turns out the featured buyer has already decided beforehand what house they were going to buy and the other houses they look at weren’t even on the market at the time.
According to the blog Hooked on Houses, a former Texas participant in the show, Bobi Jensen, says the producers changed several details of her house hunt.
"The producers said they found our (true) story — that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental — boring and overdone. So instead they just wanted to emphasize how our home was too small and we needed a bigger one desperately. It wasn't true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought so I went with it."
Jensen also wrote, "They didn't even 'accept' us being a subject for the show until we closed on the house we were buying. So then when they decided to film our episode, we had to scramble to find houses to tour and pretend we were considering." She added, perhaps most surprisingly, that "the ones we looked at weren't even for sale. … They were just our two friends' houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!"
Also, because Bobi’s husband was a Realtor at the time, they spiced up the episode with a conflict: Will his wife be his toughest client ever? This report comes on top of similar ones that have been out there for a while—some of which House Hunters producers have openly acknowledged—that the show works with buyers who have already closed on properties, and stages “hunts” for drama.
HGTV programming executive Brian Balthazar said in a statement about the show: "We've learned that the pursuit of the perfect home involves big decisions that usually take place over a period of time — more time than we can capture in 30 minutes of television. However, with a series like House Hunters, HGTV viewers enjoy the vicarious and entertaining experience of choosing a home — from establishing a budget, to touring properties and weighing the pros and cons of each one.
