Threatening to destroy whatever vestigial rubble of innocence was left standing after Cash Cab decimated your faith in reality TV, the Hooked On Houses blog has posted a story revealing that HGTV's House Hunters is, in fact, totally fake. Of course, it's called the show fake before, beginning its exposé of the popular series with a 2010 post that delved into the producers' own self-admitted revelation that, "for quicker turnaround," they "sometimes" choose buyers who are already in escrow on their chosen property, rather than buyers who are actually hunting for houses, as one might expect from a show named House Hunters.
Instead, its participants only pretend to consider multiple options, faking a protracted deliberation of fake-weighing the pros and cons, all before fake-arriving at a final decision and making a fake offer that they already made long ago. For their performance—and much of it does involve acting over long hours of filming, until they provide the acceptable fake reaction to a house they're not even interested in or are already partway to owning—they receive $500, and obviously, nothing in the way of actual help finding a house. One former subject went so far as to claim, "They won’t even consider you for the show unless you already have a purchase agreement signed, and have access to both your new home and your former home for the duration of the filming period."
Anyway, as we said, this is all apparently old news (if not exactly common knowledge), but it all became a little more concrete with this firsthand testimony from one such participant, Bobi Jensen, who backed up those claims by describing how the show faked every single aspect of their story, drafting them to appear only after they'd already closed on a new house, forcing them through multiple takes of fake conversations, and—in one of the most revealing instances of how much the show can often be completely staged—taking them to houses that "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." So basically, just assume that everything you see on reality TV, even in its most innocuous and straightforward forms, is totally and completely fake, in case you weren't already doing that.