Flip this, flop that

Television helped build the dream and now it's flashing wake-up calls for those who may have had too much kool-aid to drink at the housing party.

TV shows in the last few years have pulled out some of the worst images of real estate brokers and agents one could imagine. There was the agent who slept with the home seller to increase her chances of scoring the listing. And who could forget the blood thirsty, money hungry pictures of agents screaming into their cell phones while driving their BMWs and Benzes down the street.

The latest rage in real estate TV shows is in flipping, which is either a well-timed play on the foreclosure boom happening in some markets or an ill-timed play to get in on the action that many investors were getting during boom times.

After watching a bunch of these flipping shows over the weekend it was surprising to learn that they air the dirty laundry, the ones that don't work out.

Some shows starred novice investors working with novice project managers who grossly underestimated their renovation costs, their project timeline and in the worst cases, the buyers and prices in their neighborhoods. Some of them had to deal with potential deal-killing events like mold discovery, cracked foundations and rotted floors.

Some of these projects were houses bought cheap, fixed up and sold with rewarding profits. Others never sold, and sent the flipper to the brink of financial ruin, forcing them to come up with other solutions like renting.

At the end of the day it's television, so we can only take these clips at face value for whatever producers feel will be entertaining. But maybe the market could've used this sort of cold shower reality a few years ago.

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