One of our guilty weeknight pleasures is to curl up with an episode of House Hunters International, a made-for-cable reality show on the HGTV network about the ins and outs of buying property abroad.
The show taps a deep vein of the American experience: curiosity about the way people live in foreign countries, coupled with a reluctance to leave the comfort of the living room couch.
Each episode follows the same reassuring pattern. We’re introduced to the intrepid house hunters and learn their reasons for relocating to distant shores, which run the gamut from job transfers, to youthful adventurism, to the quest for the perfect vacation home. We learn their budget, which is often eye-popping, and watch as a realtor experienced in the local market shows them three properties, educating them – and the viewer – about the peculiarities of buying in, say, Denmark, or South Africa, or China.
As the prospective buyers tour each property, we learn more about their needs versus their desires, and what cultural baggage they’re bringing to their new home country.
At the end of the show, the buyers select one of the three properties, often sealing the decision with an awkward kiss for the cameras. A follow-up visit by the TV crew several months after the purchase establishes that, in fact, the couple made the right choice and are thriving in their new digs.
The very rare exception to the happy ending – for instance, the school teachers who moved to Poland and got a bargain on a fixer-upper, only to find, six months later, still living with two children in a tiny “temporary” apartment, that obtaining a mortgage was virtually impossible – only seems to prove how deliriously easy it is to strike root in a new country.
All of this delirium is enough to make anyone suspicious, even our thirteen-year-old, who has taken to peppering the show with impatient questions like, “Who has a million dollars to spend on a vacation house?” or “Why would you move to China and expect to have the same stupid McMansion you had in Texas?” or “Why don’t they just rent?”
This last question is very much to the point. It’s hard to quarrel with wanderlust, or a good international job opportunity, or a foreign-born parent who wants to introduce her children to her native land. But many of the buyers on the show seem to be making precipitous decisions, even foolish ones. People who decide, for instance, to buy a vacation home on a tropical island they’ve visited only once, on their honeymoon. Or, even more astonishing, that they’ve only read about on a website!
And why do these television buyers limit themselves to choosing from only three properties? Even if they tour a few more houses behind the scenes, why so few, and why decide so quickly, even in countries where the real estate market is sluggish?
Despite the suspension of belief the show requires, and the often irritating demands of provincial homebuyers (an oddly disproportionate number of whom are from Texas …) who reject spectacular homes for the lack of a familiar detail, like a garbage disposal, it’s still fun to see inside every nook and cranny of a house in a foreign country. That’s a privilege rarely afforded the tourist, even one who’s lucky enough to be invited into a private home.
It’s also fun to sit in judgment over the buyers themselves: these people have terrible taste; what a monster child; I give that marriage six months, tops.
And then there’s the cheap thrill of reading between the lines, speculating on juicy details the show doesn’t address: for instance, how the young mother of five has two million dollars to spend on a house in Jerusalem (Huge divorce settlement? Heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune?); or why the icy stay-at-home mom gets to choose the house, when the hard-driving husband seems to control every other aspect of family life (Compensation for an extramarital affair?).
The sad fact is that international travel – real travel, that is, not the virtual kind – has gotten harder and more expensive in recent years. It’s not even on the radar of most Americans, who vastly prefer domestic travel. In fact, only 30% of Americans have a passport. And even that figure is misleading. Just a few years ago, before Canada and Mexico started requiring passports, the number was closer to 15%.
Buying a house in the U.S. is one of the more stressful challenges a family can face. It’s insane to imagine that buying a house in a foreign country, with the added burdens of unfamiliar language, laws, and etiquette, is a simple matter of an exotic weekend spent picking “a,” “b,” or “c.”
But it sure is fun to pretend.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 16 June 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
