Selling the Hamptons
What real estate TV shows tell us about the fraudulence of our economy
For some reason this week I decided to watch one of those reality tv shows about real estate agents, called Selling the Hamptons. It’s about a group of realtors who try to sell obscenely expensive (and often very ugly) houses in the Hamptons, a waterfront enclave on the tip of Long island, about 90 miles away from New York City.
The Hamptons has become a place for the ultrarich to have second or third homes that they use mostly to host parties at during the summer (between Memorial Day and Labor Day). A lot of the houses go for tens of millions of dollars—there’s one on the show, called Duck Pond (the houses all have names), that was going for $35 million. So the commissions that the realtors can get are often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions, just for one deal.
The first few episodes of Selling The Hamptons revolves around the agents trying to sell the Glass House for $7 million. This is what it looks like:
There are a couple of bedrooms upstairs (presumably for dirty sex during a party), but otherwise it’s just a big open space in the woods. This is the most extreme example of empty lifestyle bullshit that the Hamptons as a real estate brand is about, but it captures the essence of what all the properties are about. They get an offer of $5 million cash for the Glass House from a guy who wants it as a venue to host parties for his charitable foundations that he runs. These bloodsucking rich ghouls love to have charitable foundations! His offer is two million below the asking price, so they don’t go with his offer. They get another offer for $6.4 million, but it isn’t a cash offer, and requires some fancy financing and so on, so it’s less attractive to the seller. They don’t really tie up that story arc—they move on to some other properties. So you don’t really know if the deal got done. I just checked online and as of now, the Glass House is still on the market—for a much reduced price of $3.9 million).
The agents threw a massive party at the Duck Pond house, with a bunch of wealthy guests who they were trying to get to buy it. They got a few offers—one guy offered about $16 million (less than half of what the asking price was). He said he just didn’t see it being worth $35 million (it’s a big house on just 2 acres of land—for that much money you’d think you would be getting more land!). The house is so expensive because the designer used the most expensive materials to make it, and filled it with amenities, like a huge move theater, spa, and a $1 million TV by the pool. It ended up selling for $30 million.
Another big storyline on the show was about a house in Westhampton that was so expensive that they couldn’t get a buyer, so they ended up renting it for one week for $85,000, to a wealthy Saudi Arabian man. His conditions included having a commercial grade pizza oven installed, and having bidets installed in all 7 of the bathrooms. All so he could stay there for one fucking week. But the agents made it happen.
So just to get one week’s worth of rent for this house, they had to spend a ton of money getting a commercial grade pizza oven installed, and seven bidets. And they got lucky that a weird Saudi Arabian billionaire just happened to be interested.
Obviously this is all sick and stupid and it shows how rotten capitalism is—that there is such a market for people to spend tens of millions of dollars on a vacation home, while so many Americans suffer in poverty, is an obvious sign that this system is morally bankrupt. But the more interesting point is how even this market is kind of fake—the big money houses never get sold on the show. At the end of the series, they quickly flashed a couple of houses that one of the agents actually sold, and they were very modest houses for a couple million. The big money ones were just showpieces, or at best to be rented out for a week to a Saudi billionaire.
My point is that the market for ultra rich people is hollow and fake—there are lots of rich people out there, but not as many as the system wants you to think, and they aren’t as willing to spend their money as the market wants them to be. Why? Because they know that we are in a recession that is only going to get worse, and they want to hold onto their goddamn money. And this massive infrastructure that has developed around catering to their whims—like entire fucking reality TV shows about selling them houses that only they can afford—is largely fake. They barely sell any of these houses—they are just selling the idea that any of this is real. Which it isn’t.