HGTV’s Reality Show “House Hunters” Is All A Fake, Participant Claims

I hate to break it to you guys, but "reality" TV isn't as real as the producers would have you believe. Case in point: HGTV's popular"reality" show "House Hunters."

The show follows a couple as they begin looking for a new home. But a recent participant on the show says that all's not quite as it seems..According to her, the whole show is staged, saying that participants aren't even considered to be on the show until they have already decided on a house.

Bobi Jensen, whose San Antonio house hunt was featured in 2006, wrote, "The producers said they found our (true) story — that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental — boring and overdone. So instead they just wanted to emphasize how our home was too small and we needed a bigger one desperately. It wasn't true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought so I went with it."

Jensen also wrote, "They didn't even 'accept' us being a subject for the show until we closed on the house we were buying. So then when they decided to film our episode, we had to scramble to find houses to tour and pretend we were considering." She added, perhaps most surprisingly, that "the ones we looked at weren't even for sale. … They were just our two friends' houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!"

Jensen, who loved the show and who currently lives in Omaha, says she's only talking about this now because her hairdresser encouraged her to blog about it. "They actually let you know in the middle of applying online (that it's not all real)," she says in an interview. "They say you have to be near closing on the house you've already picked, because they don't want to waste their time on anyone who's still in the decision-making process. And we knew we were a good fit because we already had a new house but hadn't moved in."

But really, is anyone surprised by this? I would think by this point, most TV viewers would realize that a lot of these "reality" shows aren't real at all. Even HGTV themselves owned up to the show being fake, admitting that "certain elements" of the show are heavily edited for time and production constraints. It might be a shock to the folks who still think reality TV have anything to do with reality, but for the rest of us, it's just par for the course.