You know all of the I’m building a… Or location location location, house in the country type programs.

What do the people going on them get/why do they do it? Money, their moment on TV oh look at me and my house. Free expert advice?

It seems expert advice is generally ignored for one. I can’t imagine the TV\production companies pay much if anything certainly not on the scale to make any difference to the huge budgets of likes of Clinton from last week.

Anybody know?

heir moment on TV oh look at me and my house.

Brother outLaw (and wife) applied to go on a C4 program about emigrating but failed to meet the criteria as they wanted them to sell their UK house whereas they plan to keep that and rent it to subsidize their income abroad.

No money involved, suppose the chance for some free advice.

I suppose architects, PM’s, contractors etc may reduce their fees in return for the kudos of being able to say “as seen on grand designs”.

TBH I’d be wary of going on one simply because bad news makes good TV, there’s no incentive for them to give good advice.

their moment on TV oh look at me and my house

pretty much

Money

Other than expenses for filming, it’s probably pretty much peanuts. I think the typical amount I take out of the cash machine once a week or so is more than the expenses they pay you to be on Kim and Aggie, and then the amount they pay for doing another full re-run on C4 is half that. And by the time it goes to one of the cable/satellite permanent repeat channels it would cost them more in administration to pay you than the amount they pay.

And what you see edited on screen, and what actually happens IRL on filming days are not the same thing.

I suppose architects, PM’s, contractors etc may reduce their fees in return for the kudos of being able to say “as seen on grand designs”.

You must be joking – when does anyone come out of it looking good?
What you’re really looking at is the means of adding 30% onto the value when they sell it 15 months down the line ‘cos it was on GD.

A colleague (a long time ago) and his fiancee were on LLL.

From what he said, the input was mostly advice (rather than cash) and the advice seemed to consist of “bid more to secure that flat..”. Hm.

there has been a spate of london based ones (grand designs) where the house was on the market the day after the program aired. So money.

With Grand Designs you can also sometimes get a load of products/materials for free if they think they’ll be featured in the show, or at least that was the case a while ago. Remember this one? http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-34019920.html Didn’t cost as much as it looks. 😉

some friends of ours were on ‘double your house for half the money’ with sarah beany.

They didntt get anything from the Tv company, but they did manage to talk lots of suppliers into giving them stuff at no cost with the promise that their stuff would be seen on TV. I think they reckoned they got about £25k worth of stuff for nothing. But they did have to do a lot of ringing around and hard sell to get the suppliers to play ball.

Advertising/video diary for when they sell it.

Some people just want to be on telly. Being a ‘contributor’ can be a foot in the door – one or two GD ‘contribs’ (associate producer lingo) have popped up elsewhere on telly in different guises since.

For architects or designers it’s the potential for an enormous amount of free advertising. For individuals I just don’t understand it – some of them are getting a deal from their architects for the exposure but I think a lot are just vain and showing off.

A number of our suppliers checked we weren’t going to be on GD as they’d been burnt badly in the past (the window suppliers always seem to get the blame). I’m not sure the TV exposure really adds to the value of the property as a whole. A friend wrote a column for the Indy 10 years ago when he built a house and blagged a lot of stuff – the biggest win being Kirkland Pass slate through the ground floor for free. He sold up to do the same again but isn’t on the blag this time – said its got a lot harder to get more than a normal negotiable discount now.

Whatever happened to HMS owl and the…….nice eople that wanted to fit into the local community?