Chile Forum

Hello,

I'm a casting assistant on an American TV show called "House Hunters International." We are currently casting episodes of our program and would very much like to film in Chile.

Our show follows house hunters through their search for a home in countries around the world. Participating in our show is a lot of fun and a great way to document your exciting search for a home and new life abroad. In addition, you will receive compensation for your time and efforts. Contributors should be fluent in English and between the ages of 25-50.

If you might be interested in participating with our show, please contact <EMAIL LINK REMOVED PER ADMIN NEW USER LINK POSTING POLICY> for more information!

Muchas gracias and have a wonderful day!

I just wonder if there is something wrong with people over 50.

No longer relevant

This is a 30-minute show and each episode follows a standard script - the buyers and their RE agent look at three properties, and there is suspense over which one they will choose to buy. The finale of course is the offer and the decision, and then the show visits some months later to look at the house after the buyers move in.

The shows usually reflect market conditions from the buying frenzy of a couple of years ago. It's funny to watch Americans overpaying for a broken-down wreck of a property in Spain, or Irish "investors" losing their shirts in sunny Portugal. It will be interesting to see how they spin the RE market in Chile.

xxx

It would make sense for them to film episodes in several cities with the transactions all going in parallel. Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima all have the airport access, infrastructure and enough properties to satisfy the format of the show.

We talked to them a few years ago, and they keep coming back every year trying to get someone to bite on that project. I explained that there is no way, you are going to buy house in Chile the way you buy a house in Europe or the States. Well, not in any sort of representative way of how homes are really purchased in Chile. It would at best be total edited fiction.

Perhaps a better way to put it. If you buy a house the same way you bought it in the States or Europe, someone got seriously ripped off. Either that, or as P said, the film crew will be here for years trying to get sufficient footage.

I use work as a consultant on documentary productions (PBS / national geographic type stuff) when I was in college. I know how the scripted canned formulas run for those sorts of shows. So, it would bankrupt the show or bankrupt some buyer trying to do something like that in Chile. Those shows more or less live or die based on lighting striking the same place twice ( relatively quickly ), and getting it to strike the same place three times in 30 mins worth of footage is nearly impossible in Chile.

The New York times contacted me about doing a similar article to that in Chile, where they were going to send down a photographer for a few days to photograph "traditional" Chilean houses for sale. I had to talk them down off that ledge also, for both their sake and Chile's sake (at least I hope I did).

I think if I had a camera running for all the home purchases we have ever done across Chile, I might be able to come up with perhaps 3 that would fit that mold. None of them had the same buyer involved. I can not think of a single case of a client getting off an airplane, jumping in a taxi, driving around with a real estate agent for a few hours, seeing a dozen homes in an afternoon, and then buying. Anyone that tries to do that in Chile, will simply be kissing their money good bye for good.

Perhaps a more predictable script would be some potential buyer dialing the phone in their hotel room trying to get a local Chilean real estate agent to answer the phone for 30 mins. That I can guarantee is easy footage to get. Hell, I can just turn on the webcam next to my secretaries computer to get that footage.