Surprising Rules People on 'House Hunters' Have to Follow (2024)

Even though you've likely already closed on your new home, you have to agree to hold off on any home improvement projects until you film the house tour for the show. For the same reason, production insists participants keep the home empty until it's filmed.

Could you imagine House Hunters without listing prices?! The show first started adding them in 2005—after six years on the air. Today, anyone who wants to go on the show must be comfortable with millions of viewers knowing how much their home cost.

Just like with home prices, budgets interest viewers too. All participants must freely discuss their budget on camera.

For years, House Hunters has baffled the internet for depicting couples with seemingly normal jobs searching for homes with astronomical prices. Former participant Kirstin Stone did a Reddit AMA in 2018 and revealed that her budget was inflated: "They mostly made up my budget: I wanted to spend no more than 130k, they used my max qualification (165), and tacked on 15k I had in savings as 'renovation budget,'" Stone wrote.

According to former participant Bobi Jensen, the show changed her storyline. "The producers said they found our (true) story—that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental—boring and overdone," Jensen told Hooked on Houses in 2012. "So instead they just wanted to emphasize how our home was too small and we needed a bigger one desperately. It wasn't true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought so I went with it."

Purchased your dream home? Great. It's also your responsibility to locate two additional homes to tour in your local area.

Past participant Bobi Jensen told Hooked on Houses she toured homes of friends "who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras."

The terms of conditions states that aspects of the show must remain private under a confidentiality agreement.

It's part of the show's secret sauce. "Showcasing three homes makes it easier for our audience to 'play along' and guess which one the family will select. It's part of the joy of the House Hunters viewing experience," a publicist for House Hunters told Entertainment Weekly.

Hey, buying a house isn't a quick process. "There are certain filming days where they shoot your old house and your new one and then months later when they do the other choices and you all moved in to your new one," Bobi Jensen told Hooked on Houses.

Because filming can take up to a total of 30 hours, buyers may have to take off work to appear on the show.

Contestants put in a lot of time to find their dream home on TV. So what do they get out of it? Prospective buyers are reportedly paid $500 per family to appear on the episode.

While you'll be guided through the houses by HGTV-selected realtors, the show requires all prospective contestants provide their realtor's name and contact information when they apply.

Whether HGTV contacts your personal realtor to be on the show or not is unclear. What we do know is production scouts local realtors to give buyers tours. All are volunteers and aren't paid by production.

According to Bobi Jensen, production already has an idea of what they want to capture in the tours. Jensen reshot several reactions for production—sometimes as many as five or six times.

According to a former realtor on the show, production has a few requirements for what the participants wear. Prints are off limits, so solids are the way to go.