I find it kind of weird that so many potential buyers on the show reject a house that they love because the yard isn’t perfect for their pooch. I like dogs but Rover would have to deal with it.
I realize the difference, I just personally find it funny that one show is all “Oooh, what beautiful bold colors, I love it!” and the other show is “Eww, what disgusting bold colors, I hate it!” and they’re the same colors.
This is what I think when I watch one of the other HGTV shows, “Color Splash”. An interior designer redoes a room or two with a huge bold dramatic color concept. The result looks more like the lobby of a San Francisco advertising design office than someone’s bedroom or living room. I can’t imagine the room helping to sell the house to potential buyers.
Where are they going to sleep on Saturdays and Sundays?
Regards,
Shodan
My favorite episode of House Hunters International was one where a single, 30 something douchebag of a man was buying something somewhere in the Caribbean, I think. He emphasized how he needed somewhere to party and proceeding to make inane comments during every walk through.
In the kitchen of one, standing, staring at the counter tops:
Realtor: “As you can see, the counter tops are formica”
Douche: “So, they aren’t granite?”
By the pool of another condo:
Douche: “So we can’t jump off the roof into the pool? Ok.”
And at the end, cut to him lounging with a few butterface women and beers.
There was more, but I can’t remember. My friends and I quote it to each other all the time.
We bought at least 2 of our houses because we were able to look past the existing decor. One place was owned by a hunter - we called it “The Dead Animal House” because it had 3 bears, a fox, several deer heads, and a bunch of fish and fowl. Plus they’d had a leak upstairs that stained the dining room ceiling that they couldn’t be bothered to paint. :rolleyes: But we got a great deal because apparently other buyers were shallow.
And the house we’re in now was built and stuck in the 70s - blue veined mirrored tiles in the dining room, gold veined mirrored tiles in the master bedroom, yellow and orange shag carpet in the “wood paneled” family room, floral wallpaper borders around the ceilings, mirrored closet doors. Yep, it was hideous. But we saw the potential, and we’ve got a great house in a great neighborhood, and we were able to do most of the work ourselves. Had we been the typical HH buyer, we’d have ended up in one of the bland little places in a HOA neighborhood instead of having 3 acres of peace.
Oh, and in 5 years or so, do you think granite and stainless steel will be sneered at like Avocado or Harvest Gold appliances??
LOL. I remember when you hosted “Ugly-fest”, a dopefest at your latest place. Unfortunately, our circumstances at the time precluded us attending. . .
I often wonder this myself.
Seven to ten years from now, will people look at the stainless steel/granite/apron-front sinks and think “Oh, God, this place was clearly re-done in the early turn-of-millennium”?
I expect and look forward to it happening at some point, though maybe not so soon as 5 years.
My brother has some of the same reactions with some of the HGTV shows – “who cares what color the bedroom’s painted? It’s *&^%$ PAINT! You get a pail, a roller and a brush, a tarp, and bingo, new color!”
He also has issues with the shows’ obvious push for people to do massice kitchen/bath redos. He’s got an opposite problem, in that he has classic old bath tiles and fixtures that are actually very market-attractive for the usual buyer of his type of house, and his worry is that if he has to do any major repairs, it will force him to redo the whole thing in a cheaper, less attractive mode that would lower his value, since replacements for what he has are no longer made so they’d be unaffordable to him, and so would be the really stylish stuff. These shows are quite transparently on the take from the makers of granite countertops, recessed lighting, marble tubs and those oddball bathroom sinks that look like a frosted glass hemisphere atop a slab (as Seinfeld would say, “what’s up with THAT?”).
Oh, and Raza, those properties down around the Caribbean? The ones that make the shows, it must be the agents KNOW they’re selling either to some would-be expat Yank, or to some local equivalent of the hipster-who-must-live-in-the-right-postal-code type and ratchet up the prices accordingly.
Oh, I remember those pictures and the time you had getting the mirror tiles off!
Popcorn ceilings, on the other hand, are fucking ugly. No goddamned popcorn ceilings.
Tonight was a horrid HHI - both the buyers and the realtor were inane.
“The dining area isn’t very big.” I mean really, it’s Costa Rica - how often are you really going to be hosting those big dinner parties?
“Nice refrigerator!” It’s a $500K+ condo, and you actually care about the refrigerator being nice?
“The balcony feels so exposed.” Um, yeah…you did want a condo, right?
My partner and I were once apartment shopping in NYC, and looked at a ground-floor one-bedroom apartment that had once been a hallway. You could sit on the sofa and rest your feet on the opposite wall. There was a mini-kitchen, like something you’d find in a dorm room. The bathroom was way in the other end, and resembled the lavatory in an airplane, with a small stall shower.
They were asking $1000/month for it, because it was on a great street in the West Village. That was 20 years ago. I’m sure it’s going for several times that much today.
I agree with pretty much everything in this thread. We figured these things out before we bought our first house, and used it to our advantage to sell our house and to buy our new house. People are blind, foolish, and silly, as these shows highlight.
We watched one show where the husband was an accomplished carpenter, and was able to do all the renos himself, so he was looking for the perfect fixer-upper, and his girlfriend was just horrified at what he was interested in. She did come around, but she was an excellent example of people who don’t see anything but the paint and the carpet (“this house is sooo UUUUUUUGGGGLLLLYYYYYY!”).
Reminds me of a house we looked at when buying our 1st 25 years ago. I wish we had been able to see past the superficialities as you, because I think it was a really nice house in a really nice location. But the impression started at the street, with the garage door and shutters a flourescent seafoam green. The window next to the front door was hung with love beads, and the foyer floor was a turquoise starburst pattern. In the living room we were greeted with easy listening music from the combination end tables/lamps/speakers. The kitchen was stock 50s - which I now would treasure. I remember a purple bedroom, and a bathroom with walls so pink that we could not tell if the countertop was light pink or white and reflecting the walls. The one room that was painted white had black and orange shag carpeting. The capper was when we went to the lower level, decorated like a tiki bar. We heard water running, and the agent said, “and the fountain stays!”
Today, we would have snapped that place up in a second. Back then, we couldn’t see it.
OH!!! IT’S!!! SO!!! CUTE!!!
This is cUUUUUUte!
Grrrrr…
I can handle most of the annoyingness. But, please, come up with an adjective besides CUTE fercrissakes!!!
Anyway, my roommate just accepted an offer on his condo (yesterday). We have 6 weeks for him to find and buy a new house. So, we spent about 5 hours, until 2am, looking at realtor.com.
He is not picky. He wants either a large kitchen or a well laid out kitchen. NO MORE GALLEY KITCHEN!
He wants a fireplace but it’s not a huge thing.
He wants a yard. This is just because he doesn’t like having people living right on top of him and a yard will guarantee space. Oh, and he wants to get a dog but we’re both capable of walking a dog so a yard for a dog isn’t a major factor.
He doesn’t want a house in mid-flip.
Other than that - the location is the most important thing. If it’s more than 30 minutes from his job, it totally defeats the purpose of selling the condo in the first place.
When I talked to the realtor this morning, I told her that we basically have this weekend to look at places together (after that I will be just me) and neither of us cares if the house is clean if it means we can get in faster.
We found one house with pink bathroom tile, a pink bathtub, pink sink, pink toilet. I don’t remember if the shower was pink.
We both loved the house (other than the pink). But, it was an hour from his job so it’s out. The pink had nothing to do with it.
Oh, I forgot…
Husband and wife walk into master bedroom. It has 2 walk-in closets.
Husband, “Well, there’s enough room for YOUR clothes!”
Oh shut up. Seriously, do you all use a damn script?
House Hunters International if usually far more fun to watch, because the people are insane and the prices usually ridiculous:
A recent show in Italy had people choose a house that had no access except climbing about 360 steps (really) to get to the house. First of all, it was an over-priced ruin, and secondly, the only way to bring materials to fix the house was by donkey!! Can you imagine, after dinner and a few glasses of wine, to climb over 300 steps up the side of a cliff to get home?
Then there was not one, but TWO different shows in Argentina where women were moving there - to learn to Tango. They made a big point of having enough room in the houses to dance the Tango. That is like me buying a house in Taos, New Mexico to learn Adobe software. You know, they do have qualified Tango instructors all over the world…although my guess is those women might have wanted to do more than just Tango with those Argentinian men.
Having lived in Berlin, I was looking forward to the Berlin episode - and then it had to be upscale trailer trash buying a condo for $40,000. Even as a poor student in Berlin, I wouldn’t have lived in any of those three condos! They couldn’t find a single buyer who would look at some of those traditional, gorgeous, old, Berlin style apartments?! That had to show this?!
Also, lots of people seem to find it normal to move to a country and not speak a lick of the language or know pretty much anything about the culture of that country. I can see if they showed someone who had lived in that country for a year or so, and then was buying a house - but to move lock, stock and barrel from Twinhole, Montana to a country where you don’t speak the language or know anything about the culture strikes me a bit odd.
For the most part, I am amazed at how expensive many places are - in a recent show from Hawaii, they showed 3 homes for about $1 million that were all horrible - not one of them was worth $150,000 let alone a million. I guess location, location, location really is true.
And I agree with the idiotic complaint or comments;
“Oh look, honey, a dishwasher! Yeah!”
Ya know, if a house costs over 1/2 million dollars and even DOESN’T have a dishwasher, exactly how expensive do you think they are? Fork over a couple hundred dollars and buy one.
We watched that episode. I really prefer the ones where they are looking for their permanent home and not a vacation home. So far, I prefer the episodes set in Europe or Asia to the ones in the Caribbean and Central America since all of those seem to be people looking for a vacation home in an overpriced resort area that doesn’t really reflect day to day life in those countries.
The thing that drives me nuts about these shows is…for example…
A young, 20’s couple. They will say something like “She is an elementary teacher and he works assembling doodads at the local factory. They have a budget of $800,000”.
WTF!
I guess this fits in with my experience though. Before we downsized to our current townhome we had a 3300 square foot house (bought before being built - new) in a nice suburb. The neighbor across the street had 2 brand new Lexus SUV’s and gladly informed me that her grandmother (GRANDMOTHER!) left them enough money for a down payment plus paying in full for the SUV’s…and the young 20’s couple 2 houses down was given their house (no mortgage) as a wedding present.
It seems a large chunk of people inherit vast sums of money. I’ve never gotten a fuckin dime. Why yes, I’m bitter…why do you ask? 
Oh, lordy, I do remember that one. I seem to remember that there were wild birds living in the kitchen when they looked at it. And, when it turned out that that’s the one they actually bought, I boggled.
I was a “Property Virgins” episode the other day with a young, single lady in Washington, D.C. looking for her very first condo - she had (I think it was) $100,000 saved up, and she could go up to $500,000 on the property (she ended up buying a very nice new condo for ~$650,000). I don’t know what young single ladies are making in Washington, D.C., but it seemed like she must be making a whooooooole lot more money than I ever made at 28 or so. I can think of ways this could happen (she’s a lawyer, school was all paid for so all her money goes in the bank, etc.), but it just blew me away.
ETA: She figured that she wouldn’t do so much online shoe shopping so she could fit this $650,000 condo in her budget.