Nov 08 2008
The Pleasure and Pain of Property Ladder
With the housing bubble bursting as it has, TLC’s Property Ladder has been put on hold–perhaps indefinitely. I can’t really find any concrete evidence of what TLC plans, but there hasn’t been a new episode in about a year.
Reruns still appear on TLC, so viewers can watch them, most of the time like one watches a train wreck. It’s exciting to see people dive into these huge renovation projects, and to many times transform a rundown catastrophe into a model home. It’s also fun to try to guess what disasters lie in store before the new homeowners do, or before host Kirsten Kemp points them out. It’s also amusing when she turns on the eye-rolling at their naivete, especially when the smooth voiceover turns snarky, too.
There are a few diamonds in the rough, folks who do their best and listen to Kirsten and really make the home into a masterpiece. But a large portion of these inexperienced flippers have zero common sense, zero budgeting talent, and zero skills at home improvement. They just woke up one morning and decided to get a business loan, buy a dump, and expected to make a million dollars.
The pain of TLC’s Property Ladder comes when these clueless idiots actually do make a substantial haul of cash. Viewers are treated to an hour of watching these flippers’ budget go from an unrealistic $20,000 to a terrifying $80,000, after which the flippers would jack up the price of their home $60,000 above all the other houses in the area. And then it would sell.
It helped that much of the Property Ladder flipping happened in California, where housing prices have been out of sight for a long time. A house that might go for $200,000 in the Midwest gets $450,000 or more in California. And no, their incomes aren’t that much higher.
Once the housing marked started to crumble, Property Ladder results began to change. In a way, this made the show a lot more satisfying because the stubborn, greedy fools then got what they deserved, and usually ended up with a house they had to sell at a loss or rent out. This was actually a better result to be showing to prospective flippers, because in most parts of the country, even when times were good it was pure fantasy to expect more than a $10-$15,000 profit. Depending on the neighborhood, the profit might only be a couple grand, which isn’t really worth it unless you’re doing this full time and have several properties going at once.
Without the wild successes of incompetent people, TLC’s Property Ladder seems to have bowed out of the market, for now. As much as we enjoyed it in that bizarrely voyeuristic way, it’s probably better for sensible viewers’ blood pressure and reckless people’s pockets that new shows aren’t airing.
Visit the TLC Property Ladder site here .
(Photo of TLC’s Property Ladder host Kirsten Kemp, c2007 Gilles Mingasson)
