Earlier this month on the website Hooked on Houses, former “House Hunters” participant Bobi Jensen called the show a sham.
Jensen writes that the HGTV producers found her family’s plan to turn their current home into a rental property “boring and overdone,” and therefore crafted a narrative about their desperation for more square footage.

What’s more, producers only agreed to feature the family after they had bought their new house, forcing them to “tour” friends’ houses that weren’t even for sale to accommodate the trope of “which one will they choose.”

…

But doesn’t HGTV have some obligation to portray the housing market as it is, or, at the very least, offer a pronounced disclaimer about the producers’ creative and logistical liberties?

—This story has been circling the drain for weeeeekkkkkksssss, and I don’t really understand? I thought we’d all agreed a long time ago that unless a show is produced by a reputable news network (and ha, even then, To Catch a Predator), it is fake-ola. And House Hunters is obviously super fake, just in the premise that people look at three houses, pick one, and get it (or: don’t get it, then get another one that they really wanted anyway). Those are the only two story lines, and I don’t think either of them has ever happened to anyone in reality, ever.