House Hunters

Submission 16,003

About

House Hunters is a reality television program that airs on HGTV. In the show, couples looking to purchase a home look at three different houses with a real estate broker, deciding by the end of the episode which house they'll take. The show's wide popularity has made it the subject of jokes online.

History

House Hunters first aired on HGTV in October of 1999 and has been on the air ever since.^[1] As of April 2017, there have been 126 seasons of the show and over 1,700 episodes. It has over 25 million viewers per month and has myriad spinoffs, including House Hunters International and Tiny House Hunters.

Format

In the show, a couple is shown three houses by a real estate broker who is keeping in mind their budget and living preferences. The couples often disagree with each other about what type of home they'd prefer, leading to much of the drama in the show (sample episode shown below).

It has been confirmed that the show is not true to its premise. Participants on the show have already agreed to buy one of the three houses they are shown prior to taping, and the other two houses are houses they considered purchasing.

Online Presence

House Hunters is very popular online, with over 480,000 Facebook^[2] followers and a wide fandom across social media that tends to affectionately ridicule the show. The show's popularity has inspired parodies of the its format and premise. On August 25th, 2015, Boldly uploaded a parody of the show titled House Hunters: If Couples Were Honest that poked fun at the obliviousness of the show's participants. The video, shown below, gained over 711,000 views.

Twitter Parodies

The show has often been a target of mockery on Twitter due to what some viewers find silly about the show's premise. For example, one popular style of joke is to point out how despite the couple's low-paying jobs, their budget is often very high (ex: shown below).

Buzzfeed has run several articles^[3]^[4]^[5] compiling amusing fan reactions to the show. Jokes about the show became a widespread social media trend in mid-April of 2017, as social media users created dozens of low-wage/high-budget jokes. These made Twitter Moments^[6] on April 20th, and were covered by The Huffington Post,^[7] Mashable,^[8] and more. Meanwhile, on Me.me,^[9] there are over 165,000 results that appear when searching "House Hunters."