House Hunters has been a dominant presence on HGTV’s airwaves since 1999. The show has aired more than 2,000 episodes, giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look as buyers search for a new home and decide what property is right for them.
But how legitimate is the show? Many people who have appeared on the series have spoken out about their experiences to give some insight into whether the process is real or fake. Scroll down for everything we know.
Is House Hunters fake?
House Hunters does feature real people who are looking for their new homes, but parts of the process are staged.
For example, one participant told House Beautiful that they’d already purchased a home in upstate New York when their real estate agent connected them with House Hunters. When she told production she already had a home secured, “They were like, ‘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,’” the buyer shared.
A House Hunters representative confirmed this account in 2012, per House Beautiful, telling Entertainment Weekly in a now-deleted article, “To maximize production time, we seek out families who are pretty far along in the process. 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 opened up about their experience to Slate and revealed that they worked with House Hunters after buying a property 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 shared. “Then the production crew left us for two weeks. After we moved in, they came back to film us again.”
She revealed that they were filming a tour of other houses in Florida that were actually for sale, but none of those homes were the ones she and her husband actually looked at before settling on the property they chose.
Several other participants confirmed that they weren’t even considered for the show until they had already chosen a house to live in, meaning their “hunt” that was filmed was all staged. “The other two ‘non-chosen’ properties are comparable homes found by the participant’s realtor just for purposes of the show,” one person told Hooked on Houses.
The show’s narrator, Andromeda Dunker, defended the filming process, telling The Washington Post, “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. It would just be someone’s home video of a house search. No one wants to see that.”
Are the couples on House Hunters real?
Yes, the couples, families, and individuals who are hunting for homes on House Hunters are all legitimate buyers.
Are you paid to be on House Hunters?
Yes, participants are paid to be on the show, but they don’t receive much. The couple who wrote an essay for Slate revealed that they earned $1,500 for House Hunters International, and it’s estimated that buyers on the flagship House Hunters show make $500 for their appearance on the series.
House Hunters, Every Night, 10/9c, HGTV
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