Comments

I wanted a place to gather some of the comments written about the "House Hunters is fake" scandal for my own history keeping and to share some perspectives on it:

You can pretend that everyone does their homework before making large purchases. But it's not reality. Shows like House Hunters (whether they should or not) provide many people a significant amount of information about home-buying. Again the housing market crash kinda proves my point. 
And even if every did their homework...your premise that they would act rationally is utterly false. A lot of economists have spilled ink pointing out that for various reasons we are almost never purely rational actors in an economic transaction. To believe otherwise is as silly as believing House Hunters is real.

-commenter KDL on slate.com article-

The real problem is people looked at their house as an investment. When you look at it that way it is easy to get in over your head. Rather, we should have been encouraging people to look at a home as a place to live in and raise children and grow old. When you look at having to make the required payment for 30 years, rather than being house poor for 2-3 years and then selling for a huge profit, you can make a better decision on what you can afford. And as everyone expects 30 years from now that affordable payment you have now will be even more affordable if you leave the equity where it is.

-commenter Micah on slate.com article-

I hate to see 24 year olds buying a $500,000 house as their first home. Any when they say they have wanted something "forever". I assume in this context, forever means "since I got married six months ago". 

-commenter Margo on slate.com article-