Smart TV
Property shows are booming on both sides of the Atlantic, but the key to success is location, location, location
I RECENTLY ENJOYED a wide-ranging chat with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen for this week’s RT, covering many things from how charmed he was to meet a couple of modern-day vampires, to the proper definition of “flamboyant”, which LLB explained “means arch on fire, and I’ll take that”. He also made this enlightening comment about house prices:
“Nobody wants to know the value of their home any more, it’s either too much or too little, and there’s too much guilt attached to that. What we want to do is stick with what we’ve got and turn it into a space that reflects us.”
Perhaps the inflammable arch would say that, but as I sat through the first series of Buying London, our capital’s answer to the Stateside real-estate phenomenon Selling Sunset and its imitators Selling Florida and Buying Beverley Hills, those words rang in my ears.
But before I get to London’s offering, I need to put hand on heart and tell you how much I love all of these shows, often swallowing an entire series on the day it “drops”. Sunset, in particular, is delightfully grotesque: Jason and Brett Oppenheim, gym-honed, white-teethed, pint-sized, bald – identical twins no less – run an agency staffed with Amazonian women who strut around Sunset Boulevard, find museum-sized “duplexes” for their clients and rattle off stats about square footage and planning approvals without taking a breath or breaking a nail.
I come for the catfights down in Cabo – where Jason always takes his flock, parking the wine on the table and smartly departing before the fur flies – but I stay for the properties with all their “basic necessities” of infinity pool, cinema, spa, 40-car garage… This is luxury beyond all reason, and it would be obscene, except for the fact that these women are working their perfect butts off for their own slice of the American dream and their own piece of paradise.
The same cannot be said for Buying London, where the cartoonishly named Daniel Daggers plays the daddy to a bunch of ambitious agents. His credentials were previously given a
Spider-Man meets Iron Man boost in the French version of all this, The Parisien Agency, where he was courted and fêted for his unique hand on the wallets of the super-rich. Back in cloudy London, however, it’s all a lot less exotic. The glamour is somewhat ha
