“I had never personally driven a new car,” says 2016 winner David Rennie. “I had bought one for my wife that I would drive it occasionally, but it was her day-to-day car. We’d never purchased a vehicle with all of the bells and whistles, just the basic model.”
Trying out the house before making a decision, as some winners did in the early years, is no longer an option. Feinbaum says HGTV’s parent company used to contract with builders who would take on the home’s financial liability by allowing winners to sell it back to them within 12 months. “Scripps did not want to be in real estate business,” he says. After the economic downturn of 2008, however, “it was easier and more feasible for us to [offer a cash alternative] rather than complicating things with a buyback.”
Now, when winners opt for the cash, Feinbaum and his team put the house on the market. They usually have an offer within a month, though some houses, like the 2017 Urban Oasis in Knoxville, Tennessee, go in just days.
Of the four individuals who won various HGTV home giveaways in 2017, three went with the cash. The fourth, Smart Home winner Stacy Bolder, a teacher from Tomahawk, Wisconsin, was excited about the prospect of moving to Scottsdale, Arizona, not far from her sister and brother-in-law in Glendale, but hit a snag when she landed a coveted associate principal job at her local high school just two weeks after winning. “I had to do some soul-searching,” she says.
David Rennie met with a financial advisor after winning and says the cash alternative was a “no-brainer.” He and wife, Margaret, weren’t prepared to leave Connecticut for Florida full-time—all of their family is in the northeast, including a daughter who was still in college then—and keeping the home as a rental-property-slash-vacation-home wouldn’t have guaranteed the income needed to cover taxes.
But that’s not to say the Rennies didn’t get their dream house. They used their winnings to remodel the home they already have, incorporating design elements they’d seen in the HGTV model, including blue penny tile in the bathroom, a basket-weave backsplash in their completely redone kitchen, and prints of the original artwork on display in the Merritt Island home.
Laura Martin, the 2014 winner, says even though she didn’t keep the Dream Home, HGTV gave her family “a better American dream.” They purchased a new home in Idaho with the winnings (“We literally wrote a check for it”), parlayed the Yukon Denali into two smaller vehicles, and spent a vacation in Belize, where they bought property and plan to build a winter home someday.
There’s also a vicarious thrill for people close to the winners. “My husband and I joke that the whole scenario was the most fun for our friends,” says Laura. “Everyone has a new lease on life and a belief in infinite possibilities because they know someone it happened to. I get contacted by at least 30 people every year when the sweepstakes is happening who say, I’m entering because of you!”
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