20 YEARS OF HOUSE HUNTERS
Why HGTV’s crown jewel still shines
When House Hunters premiered back in 1999, Kathleen Harward and Devon Mahallati were just three years old. They grew up watching the HGTV series with their parents in New Jersey, then obsessed over it with each other, and now the two best friends run a House Hunters Screens Instagram account, dedicated entirely to showcasing closed-captioned screen shots from the network’s flagship show for their nearly 13,000 followers.
Their Instagram audience is mostly women in their early to mid-20s who appreciate the “quotable” nature of the series, says Harward, a graduate student at the University of Washington.
“We take screen shots of what we think is the funniest or most beautiful screen,” says Mahallati, a Brooklyn-based photographer. “They have such beautiful, creative shots that we thought other people needed to see this and appreciate it like we do.”
They’re not alone. Combined, millennial and Gen Z viewers make up a significant portion of HGTV’s audience. The network’s unscripted programming is decidedly uncool and yet endlessly appealing. And for generations coming of age post-recession — and possibly living on the brink of another — shows like House Hunters offer both an escape from global chaos and a window into the seemingly distant fantasy of home ownership.
Twenty years after its debut, House Hunters is HGTV’s norisk crown jewel. What began as a 26-episode run in 1999 has since grown to hundreds of episodes per year across more than a dozen spinoffs. Low budget, formulaic and lacking any prestige, House Hunters consistently ranks among the top 10 of all cable shows, thriving largely on its predictability.
Each 22-minute episode stands alone and follows an identical procedure: A homebuyer, often a couple, searches for a new place to live that fits their price range and criteria. A local real estate agent shows them three houses. They choose one.
Along the way, there will be quibbles about open floor plans versus heritage charm, lack of closet space, an outdated kitchen or atrocious commute times. One property is guaranteed to be beyond their budget. As the credits roll, they’ll appear blissfully happy in their new abode, often toasting their good fortune with a glass of wine.
While prestige TV may attract the Emmys, the monotony of House Hunters attracts the entire household, says Shawn Shimpach, an associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“It is an opportunity to spend low-stakes time peeking into other people’s domestic lives,” says Shimpach, who wrote the academic article Realty Reality: HGTV and the Subprime Crisis. “There’s some appeal in seeing how they interact with each other, how they interact with a (real estate agent) and the kinds of values they have when they’re looking for homes. You play along by deciding which would I choose? And so, am I like these people, or am I different from these people?”
In 2009, during the Great Recession, Time listed Burton Jablin, head of HGTV’s then-parent company Scripps Networks, as one of its “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” claiming that channels like HGTV “helped inflate the real estate bubble by teaching viewers how to extract value from their homes,” while shows like House Hunters gave “the housing game glamour and gusto.”
But for millennial viewers just leaving school and entering the job market during the collapse, House Hunters offered an idealized glimpse into a rapidly receding dream.
“Home ownership has been an aspect of the American dream for much longer than HGTV has been around. On television, it’s been a feature at least since Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best,” Shimpach says. “But what HGTV offers through its reality programming is the impression of demystifying the home ownership process: You’ve heard that home ownership is the dream, here you can see it being made accessible.”
Around the same time that the housing bubble burst, HGTV ramped up the episode count on House Hunters, ensuring new clips were available multiple times a week throughout the year, an endless parade of properties to tantalize a rent-check-writing audience.
For the last decade, American real estate has been a seller’s market, and the barrier to first-time home ownership continues to rise. The U.S. median home price reached a record high of $300,000 this March, per realtor.com. Still, ownership remains a goal for most millennials, says Jessica Lautz, vice-president of Demographics and Behavioural Insights at the National Association of Realtors.
“All the research consistently says that non-owners do want to own homes in the future. But the biggest hurdle in obtaining home ownership is really the financial barrier,” Lautz says. “So whether that’s their own student loan debt or just saving up for a down payment when they have a high rental cost already, it becomes very difficult for that potential buyer to enter the market.”
It’s difficult, but not impossible. In fact, millennials — identified by NAR as those born between 1980 and 1998 — currently make up the largest generation and the largest share of home buyers in the United States.
But since 1996, the net worth of Americans ages 18 to 35 has dropped 34 per cent, and often those with higher incomes who can afford to purchase still require some assistance.
When Amanda Robinson, a 29-year-old athletic trainer at Florida State University, appeared on a February episode of House Hunters, she came armed with a $180,000 budget and down payment assistance from her parents. With her mom in tow, Robinson found her dream first home in Tallahassee.
While House Hunters may help demystify the buying process for viewers who’ve never experienced it for themselves, it also presents a staged version of reality.
It’s an open secret that most House Hunters buyers have already closed on a home before appearing on the show. The two additional properties shown are usually chosen by producers, recycled from the buyers’ now-finished hunt or staged by obliging friends.
Domestic buyers are typically paid $500 to film around 50 hours of footage, which is then edited down into a single episode.
“To maximize production time, we seek out families who are pretty far along in the process,” a publicist for the series told Entertainment Weekly in 2012. “Showcasing three homes makes it easier for our audience to ‘play along’ and guess which one the family will select.”
Since its inception, House Hunters has cast an array of buyers inclusive of age, race, sexual orientation and location. With little fanfare, it presents people from all backgrounds seamlessly achieving the same domestic goal of purchasing a home.
“I’m proud of the diversity of the house hunters we featured on the show — single, divorced, interracial couples, same-sex couples — and yet we didn’t point it out,” original host Suzanne Whang, who appeared on the series until 2007, told The Washington Post in her final interview; she died in September after battling breast cancer for 13 years. “I never said ‘interracial Sheila and Tom’ or ‘gay Ron and Bryan.’ Any contribution the show made to increasing acceptance, compassion and tolerance in this country is a very good thing.”
While onscreen representation is important, the show’s lack of commentary ignores the substantial imbalance that exists across home-buying populations in the United States. Black home ownership rates are at record lows, for example, and research shows prospective buyers of colour often face discrimination when attempting to secure a mortgage. While 72.9 per cent of white Americans own a home, that number drops to 43 per cent for African Americans and 46.2 per cent for Hispanic Americans.
“This is a show that is incredibly inclusive, and there are all sorts of people who historically have been excluded from the home-buying process who are now, without comment, just naturally included (on House Hunters). You have to erase a lot of reality in order to not comment upon that,” Shimpach says. “And in certain neighbourhoods and homeowners’ associations, your sexuality, your ethnicity, even your gender can be a factor (in buying a home). It’s great that everybody is shown as sharing in this dream, but the reality is not quite the same.”
It is an opportunity to spend low-stakes time peeking into other people’s domestic lives. There’s appeal in seeing how they interact.