TV Home Shows Learn to Love the Bust

By James Poniewozik

Americans have heard the bad news about the housing market from the press, their neighbors and their real estate agents. Now they're hearing it from former Bachelor Bob Guiney. "The real estate market has come screeching to a halt!" he cries, over the sound of squealing tires, at the beginning of TLC's Date My House. On the new show, anxious sellers stage overnight "dates," in which potential buyers spend the night at the house, the better to "seduce" them into making a "long-term commitment." (The sellers themselves are not thrown in as part of the date package. But let the market drop another 10%, and we'll talk.) "It's time to stop thinking of home sales as being on the real estate market," Guiney says, "and start thinking of them as being on the dating market."

If it all sounds a little sleazy and desperate, it meshes perfectly with the sleazy and desperate era of the subprime-mortgage fiasco, credit crisis and housing bust. If the economy of the '70s is back, the show seems to say, then let's bring back the mores of the '70s! Throw a key party--this time with house keys!

Date My House--and HGTV's Sleep On It, which has essentially the same premise--points up the shift in power between buyers and sellers. During the housing boom, it was the buyers who were afraid they might have to date (i.e., rent) forever. Your house was a coy Victorian maiden with eager suitors queuing up in the parlor. Now it's Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, facing squalor and destitution should it fail to find a suitable match. It's a contestant on The Bachelor, competing with a crowd of others and pining for a private date and a rose. The buyer, it hears over and over again, is just not that into you.

Early this decade, TV both profited from and stoked the obsession with real estate. TLC's Trading Spaces became a phenomenon. Real estate magnate and '80s relic Donald Trump reinvented himself as a prime-time star on The Apprentice. HGTV went from being an obscure channel to being one of the most popular destinations on the dial.

With the change in the psychology of home-owning--from the house as shelter to the house as investment, retirement vehicle and personal ATM--came a shift in home shows' focus. Out of fashion went renovation programs like This Old House, about restoring details and loving a home for its character. In came playing the real estate market. Sell This House!, My House Is Worth What? and many more flattered the smug certainty of homeowners and speculators that their home equity would shoot endlessly up like shares of Google. HGTV, TLC and their ilk may not have created the real estate bubble, but they certainly supplied some of the hot air.

With the U.S.'s boomiest burgs going bust, these shows already seem as dated as wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Watching a rerun of House Hunters shot two years ago is like opening a time capsule. The sellers are swaggering; home prices are rising by the minute; the buyers are under pressure to decide!, decide!, decide! before another house flies off the market. Who are these confident sellers and brokers, you wonder, and what prosperous, optimistic nation do they live in?

Newer home shows are starting to tap into the anxiety sweeping America's culs-de-sac. HGTV's upcoming Good Buy, Bad Buy? starkly puts the worries of buyers about overpaying in a falling market: "Buying a house is the biggest financial risk you will ever take." (Of course, this being HGTV--whose viewers are mostly homeowners and whose advertisers cater to them--you don't see anyone deciding to simply sit out the market and rent.)

Yet much hasn't changed. Even with prices falling, Americans still view their homes as financial instruments, not just places to live. Where else are they going to make their money? 401(k)s? Not likely--the stock market is down, thanks to the credit misfortunes in the housing market. Work? Ha! The New York Times reported recently that the economy is concluding its first long-term expansion in which the average American's postinflation income actually decreased. Jobs are declining, but many homeowners can't move to cities with better prospects because they can't sell their homes.

So Americans still fixate on the dollar value of their houses--we're literally too invested in them not to--and most of HGTV's top-rated shows are still about buying and selling. You'll know that the bubble-besotted housing culture has really changed when the home channels stop focusing on houses as commodities to flip, invest in or date and start looking at them as places to live in.

At that point, it may finally be time to buy.