Shows about houses may be a ratings winner for TVNZ, but they’re becoming less relatable for younger audiences.
Last week, TVNZ released its 2025 financial year results. Among the serious sentences about “underlying operative earnings” and “positive, non-cash impairment adjustments” were delicious details about what we’re watching on TVNZ, with the network sharing its top 10 performing shows on both its broadcast and on-demand services. While the way we watch television is changing, it turns out we still love 1News at Six and Country Calendar, and we really, really, really love watching shows about other people’s houses.
Of TVNZ’s top 10 broadcast shows, four were local series about buying, selling or renovating homes. New Zealand’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer, Grand Designs NZ, Moving Houses and Find My Country House NZ are all ratings winners for TVNZ, but they’re just some of the property shows on our screens right now. Peruse the free-to-air TV schedule and you’ll also find The Block Australia, Love It or List It NZ (plus the British, Australian and Canadian versions), Location Location Location NZ, George Clarke’s Homes in the Wild, George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces, Beachfront Bargain Hunt and House Hunters International.
It seems New Zealand audiences can’t get enough of shows about houses: buying them, selling them, chucking them onto the back of a truck and dragging them across the motu. We watch baches being built by the beach and cottage searches in the countryside. TV hosts travel across the world to explore New Zealand’s fanciest and quirkiest homes, taking us inside award-winning architectural masterpieces that we’ll never experience in real life. There’s no shortage of houses to look at, no limit to the different ways we can watch people walk down a hallway and rave about the light, the angles, the colours and the textures.
But, why? What makes property shows so popular, and why are we so curious about having a gander inside other people’s homes?
Phil Spencer and some very big windows (Photo: TVNZ)
TV presenter and house-hunting expert Phil Spencer told The Spinoff (full interview coming next week) that the reason is simple: humans are “deeply nosy”. As host of the long-running and popular Location Location Location, as well as our own New Zealand’s Best Homes (a new season starts on TVNZ on September 14), the English property guru has spent the past 25 years poking around other people’s houses. He’s in no doubt that viewers just love sitting in their own living rooms while getting the chance to peek through someone else’s.
“We all live somewhere, and most of us probably fancy living somewhere else, but we choose our homes for different reasons at different times of life,” Spencer told us. “I find it endlessly fascinating wandering around houses, great or small, and wondering, ‘what suits one person and why?’”
It’s a notion echoed by Dr Jennie Watts, senior lecturer in communication studies at AUT. “People are drawn to things that are beautiful and creative, and there is a sense of curiosity about how people make those kinds of decisions around their home,” she says. Watts also believes that property shows offer a comforting watch for many viewers, who find reassurance in the format’s familiar and predictable narrative arc. “There’s some sort of problem, we watch the renovation occur and all the trials and tribulations of that, and then there’s this beautiful outcome and people are generally happy.”
Tom Webster visits a new home in a recent episode of Grand Designs NZ (Screengrab: TVNZ)
While these property shows are a reliable ratings winner for TVNZ, they also reveal another trend: property shows rate best on broadcast TV. No property shows feature in TVNZ+’s top 10 most watched list – instead, the most popular on-demand content in the past year (after 1News at 6pm) was international dramas The Day of The Jackal and The Rookie, kids’ favourite Bluey and film The Substance. The rest of the on-demand top 10 list is filled with dramas Rogue Heroes, Shortland Street and Tulsa King, reality show Love Island UK and national institution Country Calendar.
New Zealand streaming audiences tend to be younger, with viewers aged 15-49 more likely to watch on-demand content than linear TV. In contrast, 70% of viewers aged over 60 watch linear TV each day, with TVNZ1 the most popular linear channel. There’s a parallel here with home ownership: 2023 census data shows that home ownership rates increase with age, with the highest rates of home ownership occurring between the ages of 60-79.
As younger generations become more pessimistic about owning a home and first-home ownership becomes even more challenging, it’s understandable that these viewers are less inclined to watch shows about a life stage that feels out of reach. Watts says this generational divide makes sense, given we watch these types of shows because they reflect our own cultural values back to us, and help to shape our identities in relation to what we see on screen. “The kind of folks who are still watching terrestrial scheduled television are perhaps the ones who are also more likely to be interested in renovating the home that they own.”
Property shows have been a fixture on New Zealand television screens for years, but it seems like the DIY-era of The Block NZ or Mitre 10 Dream Home is over. Now, we get to escape into someone else’s life by watching their multimillion-dollar home search on Find My Country House NZ or follow them building an expensive cliffside mansion on Grand Designs NZ. But amid cost of living and housing crises, what if you’re not into watching luxury, extravagant homes on the telly? Don’t worry – there’s always Country Calendar.