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Providence Journal

By BRIAN STELTER; Brant Pinvidic

Programs have been reworked but are still popular. For instance, Flip That House garners about 700,000 viewers for each episode aired, including repeats.

The housing market is collapsing, but television shows about housing are booming.

The audiences for HGTV and TLC, the two channels with the most so- called property programming, have grown steadily over the last three years. The reason appears to be their shift in focus away from buying real estate as speculative sport to more educational and emotional shows.

"If anything, there's more interest than ever before, because of what's going on in the market," Jim Samples, the president of HGTV, said.

HGTV's prime-time schedule -- built around the shows Designed to Sell, House Hunters and My House Is Worth What? -- now average more than a million viewers every evening.

Shows that were hallmarks of the bubble -- like Flip That House (on TLC) and Flip This House (on A&E) -- are still around, but have been retooled with less-than-happy endings. The TLC episodes are repeated several times each week and still draw an average of 700,000 viewers a showing.

"People loved comedies during the depression, too," said R.J. Cutler, executive producer of Flip That House.

New shows, like Date My House on TLC, highlight the emotional aspects of homebuying (prospective buyers can spend a night or throw a dinner party in a home to "date" it).

So even though housing may be a depressing subject to talk about, watching it is another matter.

Brant Pinvidic, who until recently oversaw TLC's programming, knows firsthand why such shows continue to draw audiences.

He recently finished building a house outside Los Angeles, but now he cannot sell his old house. So when Pinvidic describes the questions TLC's shows try to answer -- "What would I do to sell my house? What could I do to pump up the value? How could I sell it quickly?" -- he wants the answers himself.

"A few years ago, viewers were wondering 'what's my house worth,' with an exclamation point. Now they're saying it with a question mark," Pinvidic, who left TLC to start his own production company, said. "The audience has a different attitude toward housing now, but they still care deeply about it."

Last year, with the housing market slumping, programmers at HGTV doubled their orders of House Hunters and Designed to Sell, two shows offering advice on buying and selling decisions.

Susan Miller of Louisville, Ky., considers herself a student of HGTV. She said the channel offers her family advice as it sells a small rental house and searches for a vacation home.

The shows "have taught us that investing a few hundred dollars in repairs, painting and accessories can yield thousands of dollars from the sale," she said.

While Miller has not sold the rental house yet, she said she nevertheless takes guilty pleasure from seeing $50,000 living-room makeovers on HGTV's Divine Design, and $500,000 homes on What You Get for the Money.

No show can relieve real frustration with the housing market, though. Ashton Crew tuned into HGTV about a year ago as she tried to sell her home in Ankeny, Iowa. "I thought, in this market, any suggestion could help," she said. But she was disappointed.

"I found myself starting to resent the shows a little, thinking their advice a bit too simplistic," Crew said. She recently decided to take her home off the market.

Striking the right note in a down market is difficult, programmers say. "Negative content does not resonate with the audience," said Eric Black, the director of programming for TLC. "Viewers want to take away a warm feeling."

To that end, TLC introduced an upbeat trivia and home decorating game show called Your Place or Mine? on June 8. Even Real Estate Rescue, a show in development about people who cannot pay their mortgages, strikes an optimistic tone by presenting the homeowners with potential ways to get out of the crisis.

Comparing the 2005 and 2008 episodes of housing shows offers a shorthand version of the downturn of the housing market.

On Flip That House, a three-year-old series, the opening scenes summarize flipping in five seemingly easy steps: "Find a bargain, clean it up, make smart upgrades, add sparkle, get it sold quickly."

But a warning was added to the episodes in February. "The following program features real people taking risks with real money," the narrator intones. "Flip at your own risk."

As the producer Cutler said, "many of our episodes are cautionary tales." More than 100 episodes of Flip That House are in circulation now, and they have been shown a total of 2,000 times between TLC and a sister network, the Discovery Home Channel.

In the newer episodes, the subjects face more substantial challenges and take greater risks. "There's a higher likelihood of failure," Cutler said.

At the end of one January episode, Chad Sloan, an experienced house-flipper, is shown grinning ear to ear as he adds up the $170,000 in projected profit from a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Columbia, S.C. "Let's go find a buyer," he tells his real estate consultant. "I'm sure we can run one down, maybe this afternoon," the consultant responds.

But the show ends ominously. "Chad's house has been on the market for eight weeks," an on-screen graphic reads.

Facing a troublesome local housing market, Sloan decided to rent the house for a year. When episodes featuring Sloan are repeated on TLC, he gets calls from viewers -- but not about house-flipping.

"People are staying in their homes, so they're interested in doing renovations now," he said in an interview.

The enduring popularity of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition can attest to that; the Sunday night series draws 13 million viewers a week, making it the broadcaster's fifth most popular program.

More makeover shows are coming. When Discovery Home was replaced by the environmentally themed Planet Green on June 4, the new channel included three series about eco-friendly homeowners: Greenovate, Renovation Nation and World's Greenest Homes.

A&E, a cable network usually associated with arts programming, has also found ratings success with the shelter shows Sell This House and Flip This House.

Robert Sharenow, a senior vice president for A&E, called them the type of shows "that keep on giving." The ratings for Flip This House have remained steady for the last two years, even as house-flipping has grown less reliable, as they tap into a home-improvement vein that the cable networks believe will always exist, no matter how gloomy the market may be.

"These shows are never going to go away unless people stop living in houses," Sharenow said.

"A few years ago, viewers were wondering 'what's my house worth,' with an exclamation point. Now

they're saying it with a question mark. The audience has a different attitude toward housing now,

but they still care deeply about it."

Originally published by BRIAN STELTER, The New York Times.

(c) 2008 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.