Okay, I'm finally ready to publicly embarrass myself...

[J Scott]

I constantly get asked, "When are you and Carol going to get your own real estate TV show?!?!" 

Since I enjoy embarrassing myself, I thought I would provide an answer...along with a video...

As backstory, over the past 18 months, my wife and I have been approached by several production companies to do a show, and last year we signed an agreement with one of them to try to put something together. The production company convinced HGTV to send out a crew to shoot a "sizzle reel" (a short video for evaluation by the network execs). They spent four 12-hour days last summer following us around in 105 degree heat and scripting/shooting ridiculous flipping scenarios (we can now answer any questions about how scripted reality shows are).

Ultimately, we couldn't come to any agreement with this production company (let's just say there were "creative differences" -- in other words, we refuse to do just another generic flipping show like they put together in the sizzle reel), but now that our agreement with them has expired, we're talking with a couple other companies.

In the meantime, I thought I would give you a glimpse of the sizzle reel we did...enjoy!

[J Scott]

Originally posted by @Gabriel G.:

@Russell Brazil yes it is lol....

I wish I could vote this video 20 times, it's hilarious! @J Scott how much of that trailer was scripted? 

I'd say 90% scripted.  And this was probably only 25% of the footage that was shot -- we actually had storylines around two other houses we owned at the time, but those got completely cut.  

Putting on the gear to walk through the really bad house was completely scripted -- we'd owned that house for a couple weeks already and were putting off starting the rehab until the film crew came.  We had several other scenes with our contractors in that house -- doing the walk-through and trashing it out -- that got cut.  And, they didn't put in the one scene that was actually unscripted -- the old, crazy previous owner of that house walked in during shooting to look for some old memento he thought he had left in the house (he was certifiably crazy and he never would have found anything in the piles of junk he left).  My guess is that they cut that because it was so crazy that people wouldn't have believed it was real (yet, it was the only thing that was real).

The last-minute staging story was well-timed -- we were planning to stage that house the following week anyway, and just moved the timing up and had our stager in on the storyline.  The phone call I received in front of Dunkin Donuts was shot over about two hours (7-Eleven would consent to us shooting in front of their store) and the "buyers" who walked through the newly staged house are good friends of ours.

All the scripting drove us crazy.  10 years ago we would have jumped at a TV show and would have been happy to do anything.  But, at this point in our lives/careers, it's not worth any major time/effort/risk-to-our-brand just to be on TV.  We actually almost canceled the shoot the day before when they told us about the storylines they wanted to do (it was much worse), but ultimately, they let us work in some of our own ideas that we were willing to do (my wife came up with the putting on the yellow hazard suits and I came up with the last-minute staging dilemma). 

All-in-all, we did about 35 hours of shooting over 4 days (it was over 100 degrees during shooting, so we had to buy multiple days of the same outfits for continuity) and when the cameras left, we realized that we had created MORE rehab work during those 4 days.  I've heard that a 30 minute show is generally about one to two weeks of shooting...even if all the issues are unscripted, I understand why the flips all seem to go wrong -- the investors have so little time to actually work on the flips during shooting that something HAS to go wrong...  :-)