HGTV's 'House Hunters' makes move to Brandon

She was looking for a ranch-style home, 2,500 square feet, four bedrooms, three baths and a big kitchen.

In the end, they each made compromises with their selection of a two-story craftsman-style home in Brandon that offered three bedrooms and a two-stall garage, but features both a big kitchen and a big yard.

The “he” and “she” in this story are Casey and Lindsey Swenson, who took their search for a home in the Brandon area to HGTV’s popular “House Hunters.” Filming of the Swenson’s house hunt wrapped up last month and their segment will air next spring.

The couple said they immediately knew the home at 520 N. Sunday Drive was the right home for their young family, that includes their 2 ½-year-old daughter Rozlie.

“For me, it was a gut instinct when we walked in the door,” said Lindsey, who works in the financial planning industry. “The house we were living in before was built in 1904 so it had all the beauty and the charm and the character, but it also had the technology of when it was built in 1904. It was well-kept but there were a lot of things that people take for granted that it didn’t have, like a coat closet or a master bedroom, just things like that. When we walked in the door, it had a little bit of the charm of the old house that we came from, with the built-ins, thicker woodwork, things like that; it just felt comfortable.”

The Swensons, who moved to Brandon from nearby Hills, Minn., say they are always game for new experiences.

“We’re both really big thrill seekers in what we do, whether it be riding motorcycles or whatever, so after it’s all said and done, it was very thrilling to go through this and it was very exhausting, but it’s pretty cool looking back on it all,” shares Casey, who manages an engineering department at Spartan Emergency Response.

“Honestly, we applied thinking there’s no way we’ll ever get in, so what the heck,” adds Lindsey. “There’s very few people in the Sioux Falls area that have done this or have had the opportunity; it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and how cool to say that you’ve done that; it’s very unique and super fun.”

The Swensons enlisted the help of Aaron Rietsema, an agent with Hegg Realtors in Sioux Falls, with their home search. Lindsey, who met Rietsema about 10 years ago through a networking group, initially encouraged the couple to apply to be on the show after having a previous positive experience on the show with another client. 

“We’re more outgoing than a lot of people, so it kind of meshed with what they were looking for going through the interview process,” Casey said.

“They’re looking for personalities that can have fun on camera, people with a cool story, and Casey and Lindsey’s story is a very fun story,” Rietsema said.

Casey’s handlebar mustache may also have drawn the producers to the Swenson’s story.

“You can quote me on this,” Lindsey jokes. “I’m sure it was his handlebars mustache that made them pick us.” 

The application process starts on paper, Lindsey said. They were asked to detail what they were and were not looking for a home and what they liked and disliked about one another.

“All sorts of things,” Lindsey said, “Like, ‘Do you have any quirky things that you want,’ because it’s got to be interesting.”

The next step was a video application. 

“You need to tape yourselves talking to each other, answering those four questions,” she said.

The couple describes their televised house hunting experience as “exhausting” but well worth it. 

“When we got done with a month of moving and taping and doing all that, I think we reached a level of exhaustion that was beyond anything else that we’ve done,” Casey said.

After committing to six days of filming – 8 to 10 hours each day – the couple moved into their new home the first weekend in October, and three weeks later, House Hunters was back to film the ‘Now that they’ve moved in’ recap. 

“From the day we brought our first box into the home to the day they were going to be back here filming national television in our house, was three weeks,” Lindsey said.” You normally take some time to get decorated and get things done, but it was like ‘OK, let’s just crunch-time this,’ which on one hand was super-duper exhausting, but on the other hand it’s really nice to have the job done and it didn’t take a year. It essentially took away a lot of hemming and hawing on which curtains to buy; we just made a decision.”

“If definitely gives them some motivation to get some projects done they have planned,” Rietsema said.

Interior walls were painted, light fixtures were replaced and a section of the driveway was raised up before the cameras returned to Brandon. 

“Just getting curtains, rugs, getting our furniture in was enough,” Lindsey said. “But the nice thing about this house is that everything we brought from our hold house just fit perfectly (style-wise). It felt like more (work) than that though.”

Lindsey said the filming process didn’t start until they had closed on the house. “They have to know that you get the house, that it doesn’t fall through for any reason,” she said.

The trio of homes the Swensons toured on film are vastly different, and not all of them are in Brandon. 

One home is located just off of Minnesota Avenue and 57^th Street in Sioux Falls, and the other is at Six Mile Road and 39^th, a ‘70s ranch-style home that needed heavy renovations, Casey said. 

“The other home in Sioux Falls was a really modern looking house that had really sharp lines on it,” he said.

“But we wanted a bigger yard, and those are really tougher places to come by. This place has a third-acre yard and the other ones were about an acre and a half. … But ultimately, the fire department was a big priority and we wanted to be in Brandon,” Lindsey said, noting a now-shorter commute to her work in Sioux Falls and his in Brandon.

“I think the hard part literally is that I was following him (from Hills) to work half of the time. If you’re going different directions, it’s one thing. But when you’re literally going the same direction, following each other, it was just like, why are we doing this,” Lindsey said.

The producers, the Swensons tell, often referred to Brandon as a suburb of Sioux Falls. But they were quick to point out that Brandon is its own stand-alone community.

“I think they’ll drum up the fact that South Dakota is more rural. They have us feeding cows (at Lindsey’s parents),” Casey said.  “Whenever you’re watching that show, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, look at these people.’ Well, I hope people aren’t going to sit there and go, ‘Look at how weird these people are.’ I just don’t want that.”

“You try to represent yourself well and hope that it doesn’t come across wrong,” adds Lindsey

While the Swensons were adamant about living in a community where Casey could make use of his 250 hours of fire-fighting training, they were barred from promoting the companies they work for or the school district.  

“You can’t talk on House Hunters about school districts,” Casey said. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, I really want to be here because it’s a great school district compared to the others.’” 

“We couldn’t discuss that, but in reality, that was a factor,” adds Lindsey. “I swear when we decided we were moving to Brandon … people would say, ‘Oh, how do you like living there?’ and every single person told me that the school district is phenomenal. I wouldn’t even say we were moving here, but just off the cuff that was the first thing that everybody said.”

While putting their house in order in a mere three weeks was daunting, filming their segment was equally challenging.

“One of the challenging things is that when you walk into a room, they would stand there with a tablet and they would say, ‘What do you think of this room?’ because they would keep it blind to you until that point you’d walk in and say, ‘I love the curtains’ or ‘I don’t like the light,’ and they’d write down everything you say,” Casey said. “After you’re done talking the way that you’d normally say it, the director would say, ‘OK, this is exactly what you’re going to say when you walk into the room.’ And you would never just walk into a room and do it once. You’d walk into a room and do it 20 times before the director would say, ‘OK, I think we’ve got enough.’”

“They have one camera, so you’d do it the first time and get the jitters out and figure out what you were going to say, and then you go into each room, stand in the same spot and try to say the same things, and then they would do the camera angle from this side, and then that side, then close ups of me and close ups of him and close ups of the realtor, and then big, far-away shots.”

Despite “living off caffeine” and joking “they’d sleep in November,” the Swensons are simply elated to now call Brandon “home.”

“At the same time we were trying to work and make this transition smooth for Rozlie and smooth for the dog, because we got a puppy literally a week before all this happened, which was terrible timing but that was the situation we had, it was super fun, but, ideally if it would’ve been expanded on the timespan, it would’ve been easier.”

“The filming process I’d go through again, Casey adds. “But to finally be living in the community that I work in, it’s just sort of surreal at this point, just how nice it is to be here.”