Last month I posted about the Channel 9’s latest revision of the property spruiking show “the block” when I stated that..
The television hasn’t been to kind to the housing market recently. Sure the constant re-runs of Location, Location, Location, Selling Homes Australia and Grand Designs have been streaming out of the box, but more recently David Koch has been on breakfast TV informing the masses that housing was not going at all well. This was made worse when he teamed up with SQM research for a second serving of housing doom.
Former RBA Governor Ian Macfarlane has often said that one the bubble symptoms he identified in 2003 was the proliferation of property related television programs. Those with Foxtel certainly would have noticed the slow migration of English real estate TV show hosts to Australian shores as the UK housing market took a nose dive.
Today I noted that ft.com has a very amusing article mentioning many other programmes from across the western world that have tracked the rise and fall of the property markets in various countries.
If you want to see how the property market has changed worldwide in five years, just turn on your TV. In 2006, Britain had a glut of property shows that reflected the market’s bullish mood with titles such as Property Ladder, Escape to the Country and A Place in the Sun. The US had its counterparts – Really Rich Real Estate and Flip This House. Today’s age of austerity programmes reveal a different kind of housing market.
Storage Wars is a US show where auctioneers put people’s possessions under the hammer when they default on warehouse bills – often these items are in store because homes have been repossessed. This year’s episodes of Million Dollar Listing, originally a showcase for bling homes in Hollywood when launched in 2006, now looks at the increasingly ruthless dealing of Los Angeles realtors trying to find a slice of the real estate cake in the downturn.
Please hop over to ft.com to read the rest of the article. It reminds me of the extraordinary chart provided yesterday by Cameron Murray which tracked the rise of real household goods retail sales that these many shows pushed over the course of bubble:
Could 2011 be the year that housing TV dies in Australia? What would all of those former Playschool stars do for a crust?