Property Brothers: Expanding Their Empire

Jonathan and Drew chat with TV Week about the new season of Property Brothers, the weirdest things they’ve ever pulled out of a wall and the next big show in their home-reno dynasty

The minute we get on the phone with Property Brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott there is nothing but silence. For anyone familiar with the twins, this is a highly unusual phenomenon. Constant banter that makes it hard to tell them apart? Sure. Dead air? Never.

After a few seconds someone utters a “Hello?” and immediately the two of them are off to the races, joking about creating an offshoot to a popular franchise that already includes Buying + Selling, Brother vs. Brother and, coming this summer, Forever Home. “Meditation With the Brothers—Knock down houses, and open-concept mindfulness,” quips Drew.

Maybe not. But TV Week got a chance to chat with the duo about what to expect when they return for a new season and what it takes to catch these two seasoned pros off-guard.

TV Week: After doing this for so long, how often do you guys surprise yourselves?
Drew: Jonathan and I love what we do just because every homeowner’s story is different, and that’s what makes every episode unique. We’re creeping up on our 400th—that’s 400 happy families we’ve worked with. Because of all these individual stories, and the fact that we’re in a different city every three months, it gives a variety to what you see. So, we’re always surprising ourselves.
Jonathan: We also come from an improv comedy background, so it’s actually fun to meet new families, and tour new houses, and do new projects because unique comedy comes out of that. It’s fresh all the time.

TV Week: How often do you guys sit down and think about reinventing the show?
Jonathan: We’re fortunate that we get half a million messages a week each from our fans on social media. That’s direct data from our viewers saying, “Here’s what I loved, here’s something I’d like to see, I’ve never seen this before.” When we want to change something, we don’t wait until the end of the year, we implement it the next day.

TV Week: What are we going to see on the new season of Property Brothers?
Jonathan: It’s new cities. That’s the one thing that I really enjoy is that we’ll go to new areas. You’re going to see Calgary episodes. Calgary is actually where we started our real estate investment, so it’s pretty fun for fans to see us go back to where we started investing.

TV Week: Emotionally, what is it like to go back to where you started and realize how far you’ve come?
Drew: It’s a little nostalgic. When we did our first day of filming, Jonathan and I stepped out on-set, looked around and realized that this is a neighbourhood that I actually bought and sold houses in. Not far away was the first house that we renovated. It was very nostalgic, but it was cool.

TV Week: What if we’d talked to those boys back then? Where would they have said they’re headed, career-wise?
Jonathan: Drew and I were little entrepreneurs and always had our fingers in something. I remember we used to look at each other and say we’re destined to do big things. We just didn’t know what the heck that was going to be. In fact, we thought that we would be a couple of actors, movie producers or something like that. No matter how hard you try, you can never plan where life is going to take you.

TV Week: Are there any fun examples of what’s coming up on the new season?
Drew: Oh yeah! I got one that’s scary, funny and amazing. Jonathan was renovating a house and he’s in the basement. He’s ripping out part of the wall and part of the ducting. In the wall was a 10-foot-long snake, and it was alive. I think the snake screamed as loud as Jonathan did!

TV Week: What the actual hell!
Jonathan: I’ve come across a lot of weird things over the years. Even when we were filming the Calgary season, I was pulling down the duct work, and I found a bunch of antique rifles hidden inside the duct work. They were worth, like, $400 and I guess someone was just trying to keep it hidden from the kids. Who knows? Over the years we’ve come across everything from cash to hidden safes… in one of the places, there was an antique Playboy collection. That was funny.

TV Week: I assume a snake in the wall actually makes your work as TV producers easier. What’s the biggest challenge in doing this?
Jonathan: You’re right in the sense that anytime we come across a problem, the homeowners are always like, “Darn it.” My construction brain is always like, “Darn it.” But the producer and director are like, “Yee-haw.” So, there’s two different worlds.
Drew: If you’ve ever felt that you want to reach through the screen and shake the homeowners for being so difficult, that is one of the toughest challenges, because a lot of homeowners have unrealistic expectations based on what their budget is. We really are therapists, because Jonathan and I have become very good at listening to what homeowners are asking for and trying to open up their eyes to what’s realistic, but we want their minds to be blown by what we give them.

TV Week: You’re also making a new show called Forever Homes? How is it different from your previous projects?
Drew: On Property Brothers, we were helping families who are looking to buy a new place to renovate and turn into their dream home. On Buying + Selling, we were helping people that are having a hard time selling their home. But we have all these other people who own a home that were wondering, “Why aren’t we coming to help them make it their forever home?” We want all those other people, whether they’ve owned their house for six days or 60 years, to know that now they have a chance for us to come to them and make over their place so they can love it forever.

TV Week: For someone who has never seen a Property Brothers episode, is it too late to jump in?
Jonathan: Where have you been? If somebody hasn’t seen the shows, we want to make sure our show is entertaining, and captivating for everybody whether you know who we are or not. And I think because we’ve been able to stay fresh, and we change with the times, that’s what’s going to help people still get hooked on our shows, because they see we’re down to earth. We truly do care about people and giving them what they’ve always wanted, and a lot of people can relate to that.

Property Brothers airs Mondays at 6 p.m. & 9 p.m. on HGTV