The ‘Property Brothers’ Refused to Help This One Homeowner
For eight years and over 300 episodes, the Property Brothers have been wowing us with cool, thrifty renovations to homes that really need some love and care. Finding fixer-uppers and renovating them into dream homes on a budget has been the name of the game, and they’ve got a proven track record. But even these two experts can’t help everyone. It’s not often that you hear of the Scott brothers abandoning a case, but this one homeowner just wouldn’t listen to reason. And to push the Scott brothers away, it must have been a pretty tough situation.
They can get some real characters
It’s not always fun and games for the Property Brothers stars. Sometimes, they end up with really challenging clients who give them a run for both their money and their patience.
Jonathan Scott once detailed an experience they had filming with a bizarre cat owner. “Sometimes people are so crazy that the audience will immediately hate them,” Jonathan said. “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.’”
HGTV ends up choosing which homeowners will be on the show, which means the Scott brothers have someone to blame when they end up being a little strange. “Sometimes we think they cast people just to tick us off,” joked Jonathan Scott.
Drew Scott added that the homeowners are usually totally agreeable people. “”The homeowners are never as bad as how they look on the show,” he explained. “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.”
He wanted something illegal
This time around, it wasn’t that the homeowner was bizarre. Instead, it was that they wanted something illegal. The homeowner in question wanted to purchase a house built on land that was previously a landfill. Unfortunately for the homeowner, the land had not been properly attended to. “All the houses in the neighborhood were sinking. Literally sinking,” explained Drew Scott.
Things were so bad that the house had different ceiling heights in the front and the back. The front had a proper ceiling height. However, the back was a different story. “[It] had about about a 4 and a half foot ceiling,” said Drew Scott.
According to Jonathan Scott, the homeowner told them, “just level the floor out, don’t worry about the structure.” Scott says they had to simply walk away mid-filming because the homeowner would not budge.
Just not flippable
Walking away might have been the end of the problem for the Scotts personally, but Drew was disappointed in the homeowner’s choice after their advice. “We ended up walking away, and unfortunately he ended up buying that house,” explained Drew.
Drew explained that they never would have been allowed to air the episode anyway. “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,” explained Drew Scott. “The new show called, Stand Low: You’re an Idiot,” joked Scott.
Added Jonathan Scott, “We said you’ll never ever make your money back on it. That was the only homeowner, thank goodness – knock on glass that’s it the only one we’ve ever had to walk away from.”
