Buying London review: High-value homes with a very low denominator

Netflix | ★★✩✩✩

I dare say some of you have already seen Buying London, the latest estate agent “constructed reality” show on Netflix.

It’s based on DDRE Global, founded by Yiddishe boy Daniel Daggers (interviewed in last week’s JC) and consists of supposed fly-on-the-wall filming, which is, in reality, carefully assembled.

My guess is that you hated almost every second of it. Hated all the people. Hated the estate agents. Hated the buyers. Hated the sellers. Hated the progamme makers. And watched every episode. There are doctorates to be written and psychological studies to be carried out on the lure of these shows. They are the id, the ego and the superego rolled into one, the streaming version of self-loathing and intellectual nausea. I feel soiled having watched Buying London, let alone writing about it. But I have to confess the truth. I might have told my friends I  watched all seven episodes only because I was paid to write this article – but the one person I can’t fool is myself. I know I’d have binged them all even without the JC making me watch.

Buying London is a templated version of Netflix’s wildly successful Selling Sunset, which was the first in a new reality genre that mixed property porn – gawping at crazy expensive mansions and marvelling not just at the prices but the people inside them – with the office-based dramas of the model-like agents. Now in its seventh series, it is filmed in LA but its success has spawned spin-offs Selling Tampa and Selling the OC as well as what seems like dozens of copycat shows on other platforms.

Buying London is the same in almost every way, but with a different cast and city. It’s as if Selling Sunset has had its cast and setting carefully edited out to be digitally replaced by a new bunch of pneumatic women, sightly freaky men, with a London background. Even the pumping music between scenes is the same.

But there’s a fundamental problem if you’re British – especially if you’re watching in London. Much of the appeal of Selling Sunset is how utterly different it is to anything we encounter in our lives – “it” being both the Botox-ed, clothes horse, pencil-thin estate agents who look as if they each have their own hairdresser accompanying them on their site visits, let alone the team of stylists that they presumably hide in their office closet – and, even more so, the exotic California settings. Let’s just say exotic is not the word that springs to mind when the Buying London boss asks in a team meeting, “How’s it going with Stanmore?”

That’s one clue that the programme isn’t meant for us Brits. Every location is rather clunkily described (“Holland Park is close to the famous Notting Hill”). Radlett, Bushey and, yes, Stanmore might well sound exotically exciting if you’re watching in Oklahoma. If you like Selling Sunset and you’re looking to while away a few hours then Buying London might do the job, so long as you don’t mind the repetition. And so long as you don’t mind hating yourself.