By Mallory Mattingly
You know the drill. A couple desperate for a new home checks out three options, weighing the pros and cons before finally choosing the house that best fits their dreams. But is that what actually happens on HGTV’s HOUSE HUNTERS?
“I purchased my home in upstate New York in 2012, and my real estate agent, who was a knows-everybody kind of guy, was like, ‘Oh, I know someone at HOUSE HUNTERS, and they’re always looking for people. Would you wanna do it?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, why not? Sounds fun,'” a former participant on the show revealed to House Beautiful.
The participant told the show that she already purchased a home, but they said, “Yeah, that’s no problem. We’re going to find two other homes, and then just we’ll record you looking at all of them as if it was your first time seeing all these places, including the home that you live in.”
In reality, though HOUSE HUNTERS does feature real people looking for new homes, parts of the process are “staged,” TV Insider reported.
Related: HOUSE HUNTERS: ALL STARS Gets March Premiere Date
“To maximize production time, we seek out families who are pretty far along in the process,” a spokesperson said in 2012 in a since-deleted article. “Often everything moves much more quickly than we can anticipate, so we go back and revisit some of the homes that the family has already seen, and we capture their authentic reactions.”
Another couple filmed their HOUSE HUNTERS episode after they purchased their home in Florida.
“[We] got the keys to our new home on a Friday. That Monday, the film crew filmed us touring our brand-new empty house. We also shot some footage of the family at our hotel on Navarre Beach, pretending we had been living there through the extensive house search,” the woman said. “Then the production crew left us for two weeks. After we moved in, they came back to film us again.”
Other participants confirmed that they weren’t even considered for the show until after they purchased their home, meaning the “hunt” is all staged.
“It is still $500 for four full days of filming. Furthermore, it isn’t just sometimes fake – it is 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,” a reader named Nate told Hooked on Houses.
“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?” he continued. “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.”
While it’s disappointing that the hunt isn’t real, HOUSE HUNTER narrator Andromeda Dunker says it’s for good reason.
“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,” she told The Washington Post. “It would just be someone’s home video of a house search. No one wants to see that.”
HOUSE HUNTERS airs on HGTV every night at 10/9c.
Read Next: HGTV Fans Will Recognize This Voice Anywhere. Meet the Woman Behind HOUSE HUNTERS.
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