‘House Hunters’: How Real Is the Reality Show, Really?

The premise of the show is as simple as it is enticing: Cameras follow homebuyers as they tour three properties, each with pros and cons, and decide to buy one of the three. But if HGTV’s House Hunters makes the home-buying process look a little too easy, that’s because the show, like a condo gussied up for an open house, is staged.

A Yahoo! Voices listicle exposed the reality of this reality show back in 2008, saying that producers “sometimes choose buyers who are already in escrow with one of the three locations shown” and that the other two choices are “only shown to allow viewers the option of making the choice themselves.”

In 2010, though, a House Hunters participant named Nate told the blog Hooked on Houses that the reality show isn’t just sometimes fake — it’s always fake. “I’ve just gone through this process. They won’t even consider you for the show unless you already have a purchase agreement signed and have access to both your new home and your former home for the duration of the filming period,” Nate said. “Ever notice how the house the participants choose is almost always empty when they walk through it on the show for that ‘first time,’ and the other two are still furnished? That is because they have already closed on the home they ‘choose’ and just haven’t moved into it yet. The other two ‘non-chosen’ properties are comparable homes found by the participant’s realtor just for purposes of the show.”

And in 2012, a House Hunters participant named Bobi Jensen related her experience with the show to the same blog. “They didn’t even ‘accept’ us being a subject for the show until we closed on the house we were buying,” Bobi wrote, corroborating Nate’s account.

Plus, Bobi revealed, House Hunters producers made up a more interesting story for her and her husband. Instead of the Jensens’ “boring and overdone” real-life situation — they were getting a bigger house and turning their old home into a rental property — the producers decided on a fake storyline about the old home being too small and the Jensens desperately needing a bigger house. “It wasn’t true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought, so I went with it,” Bobi wrote.

The other two houses — the ones Bobi and her husband pretended to consider — belonged to friends of the couple “who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras,” Bobi said.

Also, those reaction shots you see on House Hunters might not be genuine first impressions, as Bobi wrote: “My hubby hates ‘being fake,’ so the fact that they had us do five or six takes on each scene drove him nuts.”

And if you want a hint about which property a House Hunters subject will choose, watch their hairdo, Bobi said: “There are certain filming days where they shoot your old house and your new one and then months later when they do the other choices and you all moved in to your new one.”

As Bobi’s story went viral, a publicist for House Hunters issued a statement to Entertainment Weekly, saying that producers have to “manage certain production and time constraints” and that they “seek out families who are pretty far along in the process” to maximize production time.

Jake Colvin, a House Hunters fan whose love for the show inspired him to become a real estate agent, told The Washington Post in 2019 that the show offers an idealized depiction of the home-buying process. “The show made it seem like just about anybody can place an offer on a home,” Colvin said. “But if it’s a seller’s market, your chances of getting the house you want are going to be a lot slimmer because there’s way more competition. There are so many buyers making an offer on a home that the home ends up selling for $50,000 more than the asking price. There are more conflicts in the real world than were portrayed on the show.”

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Yet House Hunters persists, still a hit 25 years after its October 7, 1999, debut, with more than 3,200 episodes across more than 260 seasons and umpteen spinoffs. Its success lies in its comforting consistency: Despite any spousal dust-ups about “character” vs. “clean lines,” House Hunters episodes match subjects to new homes in under a half-hour.

And, as House Hunters narrator Andromeda Dunker pointed out, that dependable formula is a credit to the producers who meddle with the process and massage the storylines. “If it weren’t produced, it would just be, like, you follow a couple around to see 90 different houses, and the shoot would be a year long for one episode,” Dunker told the Post. “It would just be someone’s home video of a house search. No one wants to see that.”

House Hunters, HGTV, Check Listings