House Hunters, HGTV Shows, etc.

We live in a geographic area (northern Virginia, Beltway area) where single family homes start in the 500's and go from there. The vast majority of people our age who are living in one of those homes bought their first property before the housing bubble and made a bunch of money on it, and/or were lucky on a stock grant from an employer, and/or received a large gift from family to make a down payment, and/or had a large inheritance. And/or are living paycheck to paycheck because their house payment is so big. Alternative financing is certainly another possibility on that list, as there were some creative loans that got made in the last 10 years.

We live in a townhouse that cost less than that and we bought it on an 80/10/10 so we only had to come up with a modest down payment - in fact our down payment was my DH's severance check from a previous employer which we stashed away and didn't spend. We have since refinanced into a 15yr fixed but that is how we bought this property with a small down payment.

ETA that 500k here doesn't buy you a big fancy house. It gets you 1980s-built, big-development, HOA-governed, 2000 square feet in the middlishly far out suburbs in a decent neighborhood with great schools and a postage stamp yard. 

Those shows always baffle me, and are nothing like the housing/cost of living here. 500k here buys a huge house or a very nice house in an uppy neighborhood. I have a 3000 sq ft home with a half acre backyard in a nice neighborhood. It's not even half that cost.

I agree that the area in which you live makes all the difference and makes the amounts being spent or the budgets on any of these shows pretty much useless unless by coincidence a show has a couple buying in the same area in which you live.

Because for every house on House Hunters where the better part of a million bucks gets you (what I would consider) practically nothing, there is a house on Fixer Upper going for (what seems to me to be ) so little that my jaw drops.

Here that top house would be 110k and the bottom house 300-350k

$499,000 in my zip code



Over a million

The white one is $500k, the yellow is $1.1M

my ds and dil are looking for a house, and they live in the DC area and house prices are expensive, they are looking in the $200,000 - $300,000 range - and that would be a small house. DH and I thought our house was expensive, and it was under $100,000

What gets me is the couple in their twenties who think they can afford $500k but of course the kitchen is a complete gut job they insist would have to happen. You couldn't possibly live without stainless. And if I hear "natural light" one more time I want to barf. Eight times House Hunters has zeroed in on things that are identical in my house and the diva shrieks...can you imagine someone living with that!
I am really sick of the proberty brothers.
I also hate when they are looking at condos and they fail to mention how much the HOA is...some are outrageous.

Many of the HGTV shows are filmed in Canada, where the houses are much more expensive (probably due to the exchange rate).

Oh, that paint color is horrible. I gotta have stainless appliances, granite countertops. What, no garage?

My only pet peeve is when people claim to "need" something that they merely want. They start going on about how they need these 17 things and I'm sitting there thinking "Really? Your family of 3 cannot possibly survive without those things?" Then they buy a home with only 7 of the features they claimed they "needed" and I think "Guess you didn't need those other 10 after all."

For the record, I know a lot of recent college graduate that make a lot more than I do! They chose to go into STEM careers-- engineering, software developers-- or finance. Makes me seriously question my decision to be a teacher. What the hell was I thinking?

Funny, we have a "garage" but it isn't for parking modern cars. The curse of living in an old house, it comes with a tiny Model T size garage.

Here where we live (suburbs of NYC), the houses are very expensive. We paid $500,000 13 years ago for our four bedroom house with 1/2 acre of land and all original (ugly) bathrooms, kitchen, etc. Property taxes are $14K a year. Over the years we put in a lot of work and renovated much of it. It's worth like $700,000 now. But many houses near us are way over a million and they aren't THAT amazing...not mansions or anything by any means! It's a lot of "location, location, location." If you want to be within 20 miles of NYC, you are going to pay for it dearly!