Property Brothers is a Canadian-produced home renovation program starring identical twin brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott. In each episode, licensed real-estate broker Drew helps a buyer find a run-down home with potential, and then licensed contractor Jonathan brings in a team to get the place renovated into the buyer's dream home.
The show has been on the air since 2011 and was first broadcast on W Network. The show has since been picked up by HGTV in the United States.
Unlike some other home-renovation shows, Property Brothers is not tied to a specific area. Episodes have been filmed everywhere from Toronto, Ontario to Nashville to Texas.
The program has produced five spin-offs:
- Property Brothers: Buying And Selling: Jonathan gets a couple's home ready to sell, Drew finds them a new home and sells the current one (after Jonathan finishes).
- Property Brothers: Brother vs Brother: Drew and Jonathan go head to head, each flipping a house to raise money for charity.
- Property Brothers At Home: The brothers renovate a home for family/friends. Or for themselves; the most recent series featured Drew and his then-fiancee Linda trying to finish renovating their new home before the date of the wedding.
- Property Brothers: Forever Home: The brothers remodel a family's existing house into their dream home.
- Celebrity IOU: A celebrity wants to give a friend or family member a home renovation. Drew and Jonathan make it happen.
The show contains examples of:
- As You Know: While helping people to decide which house they want to buy, there is a lot of repetition of their budgets, the expected prices and the differences between.
- Commercial Break Cliffhanger: In Buying And Selling, Drew and the editors team up to make sure one of these comes right before the announcement that the client's bid for the new house has been accepted.
- Home and Garden: Twin brothers help families renovate run-down homes into dream homes.
- Once an Episode: An unforseen problem cause the budget to go up. Mostly, they find savings somewhere else to offset it, but sometimes they just go over budget.
- Product Placement: Home decor in Brother vs Brother comes from whichever home decor company bought the rights that season. Cue the designers casually mentioning which website they're pulling up to pick furniture from, or shots that just happen to show company logos on the delivery boxes.
- This Is Reality
- Some of the couples don't have a clue what the local real estate market is like. This can be really noticeable in Buying And Selling — one episode's couple not only overvalued their current home by $200,000, but assumed they could get a larger home closer to the city for much less than the actual value of the current home. Drew had to deliver a matched pair of reality checks.
- Home inspectors don't catch everything, and Jonathan has needed to tell couples on several occasions to find something to cut from the renovation plans because a chunk of the budget has to go toward removing asbestos or fixing not-to-code electrical wiring.
- Self-Deprecation: In one episode, the family Drew and Jonathan were working with included identical twin girls. The brothers agreed that those girls were the cutest twins they'd ever seen.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: Drew, in both the main series and Buying And Selling. (The suits and ties go away in the competition shows, when he's working on the houses.)
- Sibling Rivalry: The light-hearted version shows up a lot in Brother Vs Brother.
- Twin Switch: One episode of Buying and Selling started with the brothers dressed as each other to prank their clients (who were big fans of the show). It didn't work, there's just enough differences between their hairstyles and voices that the clients knew there'd been a switch.
- Trash the Set: Demo day.
