Mapping House Hunters
Let me begin this post by saying that I know House Hunters is (at least partially) staged. I know the dud houses are sometimes a home belonging to friends of the granite-obsessed couple’s, cleared of clutter for TV. I know that they already decided upon the house I hate three months ago. Let me just say that I don’t care.
House Hunters could have the production value of the Blair Witch Project and I’d still be glued to my TV, grumbling under my breath about popcorn ceilings.
There’s something enchanting about the voyeurism House Hunters allows. I don’t have to feel guilty about the way I crane my neck to peek into the windows of million-dollar brownstones on Beacon Street or consider whether or not it’s worth it to bang a U-ey so I can get a better look at a gorgeous 1920s colonial in Brookline. House Hunters is like being able to play with an infinite set of dollhouses, except that the dolls keep picking the split-level when you want them to pick the Craftsman.
Every three months or so, Buzzfeed churns out a listicle of all the annoying things people on House Hunters do, and I oblige my millennial overlords by reading it and nodding my head at every point.
There’s always been something missing from discussions of House Hunters. We know the budgets are unrealistic (how do Penelope and Thad have a $1.2 million budget in Chicago when he’s a part-time bongoist and she sells her own home-brewed kombucha?), especially when an episode takes place in a notoriously high-rent city. But more often than not, I find myself watching an episode that ends in me salivating over the idea of paying $350,000 for a four-bedroom three-bathroom house with a spacious backyard. I cease drooling when I think about what a North Dakota winter would do to my already dry skin.
I’ve always been curious about the locations of House Hunters episodes as a whole, partially for the selfish reason that I want to see inside more houses in the Boston area. I feel like I always get trapped watching 20 episodes set in a flyover state where every house is a new construction McMansion. So I did what any sane person would do: I went through HGTV’s list of House Hunters episodes and counted how many times each state was featured on the show. As far as I can tell, I am the only freak on the web to ever do this. You can view the data here.
As of November 2017 when I originally wrote this article, there were 1678 episodes of House Hunters. This does not include House Hunters specials like Tropical Getaways (which I don’t think I’ve ever seen, like the third Property Brother), House Hunters International (which is great to laugh at as Texans panic about small kitchens), and certainly not Tiny House Hunters (which is the reason my blood pressure just spiked as I thought about yet another 6’7” craft beer brewer complaining about not being able to stand up in his loft).
I had to count one episode twice because the description for the episode said the family was deciding between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I couldn’t find the episode online to verify if they chose to live free or Dunkin’ die, so each respective state got an entry.
I learned several interesting things about House Hunters through this process, the most surprising being that there has never been an episode in Alaska! Seward’s Folly gets no love.
Some episode locations were harder to track down. At some point around the twenty-third season, whoever was tasked with writing the descriptions for each episode simply gave up. “More Room For Everyone: A new family needs more room, especially for the soon-to-be teens.” Great! I know so much about this episode now. This is where the 12 unknown episodes come from, because despite my digging, I couldn’t find anything about where these episodes took place.
That being said, what some episode descriptions lacked in obvious locations, they made up for in more interesting information. Early episodes listed the realtor assisting the buyer(s), so when no location was listed, I simply Googled the realtor’s name and “real estate” to see if their office turned up to give a clue.
There were a couple times when I searched a “realtor’s” name and an IMDb credit page came up. You tell me. There were also a few occasions where the same search terms turned up nothing relevant, except when I searched that name with the buyer’s name. In one such case, I found a project the buyer and “realtor” had worked on in elementary school. Again, you tell me.
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California, Florida, and Texas made sense as the frontrunners, given their populations and the fact that so many of the first episodes were filmed exclusively in California. But New York and New Jersey being so far down the list is surprising, considering NYC’s real estate market and the sheer amount of people who must be looking for homes in the tri-state area at any given time.
This may have something to do with HGTV’s show Selling New York, which focuses more on high-end listings. Budgets vary pretty widely on House Hunters, even in cities like Los Angeles, where buyers on the show spend anywhere from $500,000 further inland to millions in the Hollywood Hills. A quick Zillow search of Manhattan gave me a heart palpitation as every listing seems to be at least a million dollars.
Tennessee being so high came as a huge surprise to me. I loved the 24 hours I spent in Nashville, and wow, the houses there were adorable, but I severely underestimated the popularity of The Volunteer State. Apparently, it’s a city to watch when it comes to real estate.
On a more seasonally appropriate note, I discovered that there are at least four episodes wherein someone moving to Connecticut or Massachusetts makes it abundantly clear they do not want a haunted house. What else would you move here for? The public transit?
And my most delightful find: Season 131 Episode 12 is called “Expanding in South Hadley”, which is where Mount Holyoke, my alma mater is located. South Hadley does not exactly have the clout that say, Chicago does, so I am honestly baffled why they put it in the title as if it will resonate with anyone who isn’t a regular at Tegan and Sara concerts.
