Homewood family to appear on HGTV

Homewood is being featured this month on HGTV’s “House Hunters.” Real estate agent Johnny Montgomery and his family were featured as he helped find a home for his daughter Megan Montgomery and her husband Chris Skyes.

The show will air on HGTV on Wednesday, Oct. 19 at 9 p.m.

The family was picked to be on the show after Megan called HGTV about it. It was a unique situation to pitch to the show having a real estate agent selling to his daughter.

“Me and my husband were watching 'House Hunters' one night and we had already been house searching,” Megan said.  “I Google searched and they were taking applications for young couples in our area so I knew it was meant to be.”

Johnny said he had never even watched the show before, it was always on but the last thing he wanted after closing houses all day was watch a show on real estate. One hesitation of them getting cast for the show was knowing if Johnny would be good on camera. They had to send in a video audition for the last round of the casting process.

“They filmed me in a vacant house as I pretended to be showing it to customers,” Johnny said. “I was pointing out all of the kitchen utilities and then shouted ‘hey, look at those shiny hardwood floors’ and I started moon-walking across them. After the producers saw that, they said we have to have that dad on our show.”

A full crew from “House Hunters” came to Homewood in March to film for a little over a week. A month later, they came back to follow up and finish filming. Megan said that on their first day of filming they were a bit nervous but the crew made them feel at home and helped them have a lot of fun.

“It was real life but cameras were following us around,” Megan said. It made the process more exciting and at the end the result was perfect. We loved feeling like a celebrity for a few days.”

Johnny said the show was exciting but he felt how he acted was controlled during the process.  He said he felt like he was in a box throughout filming, however he knew they had to make sure it was appropriate.

“I have a lot of one-line jokes and they cut most of that stuff out. They would trim most of what I said,” Johnny said. “I feel like they took away a lot of my personality.”

They may have cut out a lot of his humor, however they were not able to cut out his emotions from this experience with his daughter.

“They pulled me aside once and asked me how I felt about finding my daughter her house,” Johnny said. “I couldn't help from getting emotional when thinking of my baby girl and this being another big step in her life.”

Johnny is most looking forward to the show airing to see how excited Megan will be. Megan knows this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and she can not stop smiling about it.

“A piece of advice I can give to people house hunting is to always be willing to compromise,” Megan said. “Our expectations were very high going in, but we had to come back to reality and know what we could get with our priorities in our budget.”

Johnny will host a viewing party at the ERA King Real Estate office on Oct. 19. Demetri’s BBQ will cater this event and also be featured on the show as “House Hunters” filmed in the restaurant.

For more information go to the HGTV website.