‘I Blame House Hunters’: How real estate agents use property TV to manage clients and establish expertise

ABSTRACT

Property television is an increasingly popular form of lifestyle media, but its practical impact on the housing market is mostly unknown. In this analysis, I reveal one way that property television intervenes in the housing process by describing how it is interpreted and deployed as a cultural resource by real estate agents. Drawing on diverse forms of data, I find that while real estate agents are often critical of property television, they strategically use it to establish themselves as market experts; indeed, their criticisms set up a direct comparison between ‘unrealistic’ property television depictions and their own status as reliable and valuable market guides. These findings contribute to research on property and reality television, as well as to research on the role of culture in market exchange, by revealing the tangible role of this salient cultural object within housing interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing market
• lifestyle media
• television
• market intermediaries
• HGTV

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the reviewer and editors of this article for their help in preparing this paper for publication, and Terence McDonnell for his helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. The author also received helpful feedback from participants in the Popular Culture Association meetings in 2018, and from her fellow presenters at the Culture Section Roundtables at the American Sociological Association meetings in 2016.

Ethics statement

This research was approved by the IRB Committee at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, where the author was a graduate student. This research was part of a larger study, titled ‘Choosing a Home: Decision-Making, Imagined Futures and the Meaning of Home.’ Its IRB protocol number is 15-05-2553, and it was approved while Kate Mueller was Associate Director of the committee.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Colloquially, the terms realtor, real estate agent, and real estate broker are used interchangeably. Anyone with a real estate licence is an agent, but, technically, only agents who are members of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) may be classified as Realtors. As such, I generally use the terms ‘agent’ and ‘real estate agent’ in this paper. I use ‘realtor’ only when referring to agents explicitly linked to NAR.

2. A full list of these documents is available upon request from the author.

3. Early findings from this analysis were presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association Annual Meetings in a presentation titled ‘Revising Cultural Scripts: Real Estate Agents Attempt to Counteract the Effects of Property TV,’ and at the 2018 Popular Culture Association meetings in a presentation titled ‘Property Television and the Cultural Construction of Home Buying in the US.’

4. While ‘discount’ and ‘flat-fee’ agencies are becoming more common, most real estate agents and agencies in the U.S. still operate on a commission model, with average commissions ranging between four to seven percent of the sale price of the home (Zillow 2018).

Additional information

Funding

I received the American Dream Summer Grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. It was a small internal award.

Notes on contributors

Kelcie Vercel

Kelcie Vercel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the United States. Her research focuses on the intersections of materiality, consumption, family life, and the self.