Think being on television is all glamour and glitz?
Don’t tell that to Chris and Kathy Brady. A film crew spent three days at their North Barrington home in July as part of the homeowners’ appearance on “Sell This House,” a new home show airing on cable TV’s A&E network.
The crew, directed by clipboard-toting producers, filled a first-floor room with computers, cameras, boom lights and microphones, and then took over much of the rest of the house. And as part of their brush with fame, the Bradys spent nearly 72 hours hefting furniture from an outside patio to a bedroom, cleaning and painting walls, and scrubbing toilets. They even had to take off on an emergency late-night run to find a new bathroom sink before the local home store closed. This came after spending hours unsuccessfully trying to paint their bluish sink a more neutral white.
“It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s enticing in many ways. But it’s kind of like when you’re running in a marathon,” said Chris Brady, of the filming experience. “You go through the finish line, and it’s only then that you realize how badly you hurt.”
The Bradys are part of a growing contingent of homeowners to appear on national TV along with their ranch homes, Cape Cods and Victorians. Home shows–whether they air on the reigning king of domestic television channels, Home & Garden Television, better known as HGTV, or show up on local networks–have become staples of TV viewers.
Viewers like the armchair voyeurism of peeking into the bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms of fellow homeowners, and many spend hours in front of their sets fantasizing about how a free makeover could transform their own homes.
Producers from “Sell This House” spent two weeks in the Chicago area in July filming a pair of local homes: the Bradys’ and the single-family home owned by Chicagoans Carol and Gerald Francis. The episode featuring each home aired in early October.
“Sell This House” is one of the newer home shows around. Each week, the show features homeowners whose residences are on the market. The producers hold an open house and film the comments of prospective buyers as they tour a home. Decorating expert Roger Hazard, along with the help of the homeowners, a telegenic host and a busy film crew, then have a day-and-a-half to act on these comments, rearranging furniture, painting walls and eliminating clutter in an effort to make the home more salable.
After the mini-makeover is complete, the same potential buyers tour the home during a second open house, with camera crews again filming their reactions. The goal, as the show’s title suggests, is to move the homes off the market. And in New York City, where “Sell This House” shot one its first episodes, that’s exactly what happened–both homes sold shortly after Hazard’s makeovers.
How did the Francis and Brady families manage to land their shot at celebrity? How does any family, for that matter, get their home on one of the growing number of real estate-themed shows filling the airwaves?
The producers of these shows, network executives and homeowners themselves have plenty of tips for homeowners who want to join this elite club.
Their top tip: A family may own the perfect house for a reality real estate program. But if the family members aren’t comfortable in front of the camera, that ideal house won’t be enough.
“What did we do to get on the show? We gave them drinks,” Chris Brady joked. “No, that’s not true. Did we have a good personality for the show? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
But he did admit he and his wife both have jobs that focus on strong communication skills. “My wife, Kathy, is a schoolteacher, so she’s in front of kids all the time. I think that being in front of the camera or the audience was not alien to her,” he explained. “I’m in [information technology], computer sales and consulting, so I’m in front of people all the time, too, trying to teach and sell. My daughter, Jennifer, was home for the summer. She became part of the filming audience. I think Jenny became a bit of an attraction. …There aren’t too many daughters who are willing to go through this.”
Producers of home shows agree with Brady. Part of the equation is having the right house at the right time. To land a spot on a show such as “Sell This House,” it helps to be a bit lucky. Producers don’t want to feature a suburban ranch house if the last show spotlighted the same type of house. And producers often don’t want multimillion-dollar mansions, but houses with which ordinary people can identify.
In the case of “Sell This House,” the home also must be on the market and have received at least some negative comments from potential buyers. With the Bradys, the biggest problem seemed to be that the house looked a little dated. The family had lived in the house for more than 20 years, and potential buyers thought the home’s decor and furnishings looked, in the words of producers, “tired.”
“We are looking for homes that, for whatever reason, just aren’t selling,” said Tanya Memme, the on-air host of “Sell This House.” “We’re here to give advice to the homeowners and make changes. We can’t have a house, then, that doesn’t need any improvements.”
But as important as the right home is, producers of home shows say that it’s the homeowners’ personalities that will actually get them on camera.
“We’re looking for personality, obviously,” said Nancy Dubuc, executive vice president of documentary programming at A&E. “We’re interested in the person’s comfort level in front of the camera. We’re also looking for a good story connected to the home. These are the things that make the show come alive. The people who get on the shows tend to have all these pieces at once. The real trick in casting is to find the complete package.”
When looking for homeowners, show producers will often put notices in newspapers or on their Web sites. They may make an announcement at the end of a show. Producers conduct preliminary telephone interviews with potential show subjects, Dubuc says, and often ask participants to put together a home-video interview. A field producer may pay an on-site visit to the finalists’ homes.
Wannabe celebrities, though, should be warned: The competition to land a slot on one of the home shows is intense.
“We get easily a dozen people to every one person that makes it on the air,” Dubuc said. “We find some wonderful characters, but we may have to revisit them next season or during the next round of production. More often than not there are too many good people. We wish we could feature more people than we can.”
They like conflict
DeDe Barnum, executive producer of “Decorating Cents,” a Minneapolis-based design show that airs on HGTV, said that she pays as much attention to the stories that potential guests bring to her as she does to their homes.
“Not only does the designer have to be inspired by a room, but we also have to consider if there is conflict involved,” Barnum said. “If they agree on everything, it’s a little soft. We look for that spark. We look for husbands and wives who disagree.”
Still, a perfect home, wonderful personality, interesting story and a bickering husband-wife team aren’t always enough to guarantee a slot on the latest home show. Producers also search for diversity in home styles and locations.
“If we featured only large homes in the suburbs, that would be fine, but that would not address everyone in America,” said Michael Dingley Sr., senior vice president of programming for HGTV. “Sometimes we need to feature a single person living in a loft. We really mix it up that way. It’s very important to have diversity in our programming. The producers are under orders to bring in a diverse crowd of homeowners and homes.”
Even for those homeowners who do beat the odds and make it on home shows, there’s one more question: Is it worth it?
Carol Francis says yes.
Francis and her husband, Gerald, are the owners of the first Chicago-area home filmed by the “Sell This House” crew. The couple put their North Side home on the market in March and are looking forward to living full time on property they own in Boca Raton, Fla. Carol Francis, along with her daughter, Melissa Hill, spent long hours painting the home’s kitchen, boxing up the family photos filling its walls and lugging furniture from one room to the next. When the transformation was complete in July, Francis was thrilled. She hopes the home’s new airy feel helps it move quickly off the market.
The whole experience, in fact, was a good one for Francis. She only had one doubt, when designer Hazard asked her to remove an L-shaped table and chair arrangement out of the kitchen and into storage in the garage. Hazard’s idea was to substitute a smaller table-and-chair set for the kitchen to make the room appear larger. The only problem was that Francis had just bought the L-shaped table five years ago and had spent a lot of money on it.
“When they told me that, my face must have fell 5,000 feet,” Francis said. “But once we got it out of there I had to agree that it really did open up the room.”
Francis says she isn’t quite sure how she and her home ended up on “Sell This House.” She did say, though, that she tried to showcase her sense of humor while videotaping a tour of her home for producers.
Francis also said she enjoyed working with the crew and cast of the show. She’s especially fond of a story involving Hazard, a burly, muscle-bound designer. As he, Francis, her daughter and crew members put the finishing touches on the home, the time for the second round of open-house visitors drew perilously close. Hazard grabbed a hair dryer and turned it on his shirt, trying desperately to dry up some patches of perspiration before he went on camera again.
“Everyone was great. And everyone helped with the work,” Francis said. “[Hazard] did too. I don’t want to give the impression that he just stood around all day with a hair dryer.”
Francis’ real estate agent, Ed LoBue, of the Lincoln Park office of Baird & Warner, said he didn’t hesitate to recommend his client’s home to the producers of “Sell This House.” The reason is simple: It’s just one more bit of exposure for a property.
“This is something completely out of the box,” LoBue said. “Traditionally, you don’t have your house on a TV show and have a professional designer come in and show you how to improve on it. They were excited about the prospect. Once they were chosen, they were absolutely delighted. Of course, that was before the show. She’s still happy she did it, and it was a lot of fun, but they do make you work. I called her up after they finished taping and asked her, `So, you still like me?'”
And homeowners shouldn’t worry that producers will force them to spend tons of money updating their homes. The changes brought about through “Sell This House,” for example, tend to be inexpensive but important ones.
“We never make major changes,” said Liza Keckler, associate producer with Screaming Flea Productions, the Seattle-based company that films “Sell This House.” “We do a lot of little things. For instance, in one house we filmed, we came across a Buddhist prayer room. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we did tell the owners that they should take that down. It’s too personal and it makes it difficult for possible home buyers to see themselves in that room.”
Now that the A&E show has aired, LoBue reports that the Bradys have been inspired with their house’s possibilities. The homeowners have, for instance, decided to tear up their home’s carpets and restore the wood floors underneath them. To finish the work, the family took the home off the market after the show aired. LoBue plans to relist the home later this month.
