'The Property Brothers': "Sometimes HGTV Casts People Just to Tick Us Off"
When you work on people's homes, things are bound to get personal from time to time. Combine that with tight deadlines and the fact that it's being filmed for national television, and it's a recipe for some seriously tense moments. That's something Jonathan and Drew Scott, aka HGTV's Property Brothers, know all too well. Apparently, they've worked with some crazy clients, and they opened up about their experiences at a recent event promoting their new memoir It Takes Two: Our Story, out now.
"You'll notice I get a throbbing vein," Drew said of dealing with some homeowners. "I'm pretty patient and I put myself in their shoes and everything, but we're taking what's normally a long renovation and squeezing it [into an episode]."
"Sometimes people are so crazy that the audience will immediately hate them," Jonathan jumped in. "We had this one woman on Buying and Selling who was loco. When we were working, construction team and everything, if her cat walked into the room while we were working, she said we had to stop everything until the cat decided to leave on its own. We were like, 'No, it's not happening when we have two weeks.'"
But, the brothers conceded, the network might be to blame for that-HGTV picks the homeowners, after all. "Sometimes we think they cast people just to tick us off," Jonathan says.
If you've ever dreamed of appearing on Property Brothers or Buying & Selling, don't let that scare you away: The Scotts say they don't edit the episodes to make clients look bad.
"When homeowners come in and say 'Well I don't want to look like a jerk on TV,'" Drew said. "My response is, 'Don't worry, if you are a jerk, you will look like a jerk.'"
Still, some of the drama is simply amplified because of the structure of the program.
"The homeowners are never as bad as how they look on the show," Drew said. "Because we're taking two or three months of renovation and cramming them into forty minutes. You see the highs and the lows, so it's not quite as stressful. The ones that usually get frustrating … at the end of the day, I'll tell them, 'You're bringing us in as professionals. This is what we do day in and day out, you have to trust us.' There's only been one homeowner who just didn't get that ... we started filming and then ended up canceling filming."
That client was a fireman searching for a home in Toronto. They thought it would be great TV and had visions of his fellow firemen buddies pitching in on the construction. That is until he went against Jonathan and Drew's advice and chose a house built on an old land fill that was sinking. His plan? To level the floor instead of correcting the problem properly.
"We said, 'No, we won't do that,'" Drew said. "We had filmed the search and at the end of the day he bought that house and we said we're not going to renovate it because we wouldn't be allowed to get permits."
Jonathan added, "HGTV would never air that anyway."
"The new show called, Stand Low: You're an Idiot," Drew joked. "Watch for it in the fall."
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