The housing market has slowed down, but house-hunting shows on television are still booming. Joe Moran on the deception behind all that property porn

When did houses begin to turn us on? "Property porn" has entered the latest edition of the Collins dictionary, defined as "a genre of escapist TV programmes, magazine features, etc, showing desirable properties for sale, especially those in idyllic locations, or in need of renovation, or both". It originated as a term describing those Country Life advertorials for impossibly expensive manor houses, but it really entered the language in the late 1990s with the arrival of TV property shows.

In 2004 the investment bank Durlacher created a TV index that counted the number of these shows dedicated to making money out of housing, claiming that "probably the best indication of difficulties in the market will be when Property Ladder is no longer commissioned". In fact, this hasn't happened - the shows are still thriving even though the market has slowed down. Their resilience lies in their adaptability. That old idea of the housing market as a pain-free gateway to instant riches is so last millennium. Different formats cover every eventuality. Buy-to-let market slowing down? A perfect opportunity for audience schadenfreude, as stubborn souls ignore the sage advice of Sarah Beeny, replace their Victorian fireplaces with MDF fakes and end up in penury. No more bargains to be had in the provinces? Check out the prices in Prague or Vilnius. First-time buyers can't get on the property ladder? Try Come Buy With Me, a new BBC3 game show that pairs off strangers so they can buy a house together.

In her book Sex and Real Estate, the American critic Marjorie Garber argues that house-hunting has become a form of "yuppie pornography". One of the great dreams of the house-hunter, she writes, is the "Cinderella house", which is "the Beast that becomes a beauty when looked upon with the eye of love - a neglected, falling-down property that needs to be nursed back to health and beauty - to be, in short, Understood". Literary critics used to call this "pathetic fallacy": the attribution of human qualities to inanimate things. Not only can we love houses like people; they will also respond to our love. Garber is right that the dream of transformation is what drives property porn. But she ignores the way in which the market forces buyers into hard calculations, so that they are only likely to buy houses with the guarantee of a profit when they are eventually sold on. There are no Cinderella houses in the boarded-up streets of Toxteth, near where I live; Prince Charming doesn't go there very often. Property porn is rarely about this kind of "location location location": issues such as the social make-up of particular areas, or the symbolic value of particular postcodes, are barely mentioned.

In the Thatcher years the classic dinner-party conversation was about the house whose value rose without you having to do anything. Now there is more emphasis on "sweat equity", which combines (and confuses) the creative pleasures of house renovation with property development. The deal-clinching denouement of the property show must be earned. Narrative gold for this kind of programme is not the new-build house, or the flat bought off-plan; it is the "blank canvas" or "project", the dilapidated house in need of "TLC". This preoccupation with entrepreneurial renovation has its origins in the mid-1960s, when the broadsheets began to feed and cultivate a new middle-class appetite for amateur property speculation. In articles in their lifestyle pages about which down-at-heel areas of London were on the up, these newspapers equated gentrification with middle-class self-betterment. They hailed gentrifiers as the "frontier middle classes" or "pioneers", who "make money out of the place but keep a calculatingly protective eye on its character".

The funny adverts from the estate agent Roy Brooks, which ran in the Observer and Sunday Times throughout the 1960s, were much loved by their readers. A typical ad would try to sell a "glum attic flat for midgets" in Islington, with "repulsive decor" and a "so-called garden". But Brooks adverts also flattered the self-image of the urban middle classes by suggesting that doing up properties was a romantic, foolhardy gesture rather than a financial investment. The apparent candour does not seem to have discouraged clients; the agency was one of the most successful in London. As the urban geographer Neil Smith argues, the term "urban pioneer" suggests "a city that is not yet socially inhabited - the contemporary urban working class is seen as less than social, simply a part of the physical environment". The frontier imagery of gentrification allowed it to float free of the more brutal dynamics of the housing market, such as the eviction of sitting tenants from those up-and-coming areas.

The same, unreal notion of the market reappears in today's property porn. If inflation is the bete noire of post-Thatcherite economics, then why are vertiginous house prices seen as the sign of a healthy economy? The answer is that huge financial industries, along with subsidiary industries based on interior design, furnishings and refurbishment, have developed to lock people into these systems of debt and equity.

In this climate the housing market must never be seen for what it is: an unstable amalgam of public-relations hype, guesswork and groupthink, to which property porn contributes. It must be seen as rational and predictable - an identifiable entity to which various authorities (mortgage lenders, estate agents, television presenters) can bring their "professional" expertise. In property porn everything happens for a reason. When buyers get their dream house it is because they have been adaptable and persistent in their search. When they lose out it is because they have not done what they were told to do by an omniscient presenter. The market can be anticipated and interpreted but never questioned: it is uncontrollable, unstoppable and, above all, apolitical.

The unmentionable truth behind property porn is that the housing market impoverishes rich and poor alike. Rising equity may give homeowners a sense of increasing wealth, but all that most of them have at the end of the process is an object that they need - a house - which they can exchange only for another, equally expensive house. The real winners in this process have been the professional developers who make cash purchases of large numbers of properties. Even the richest of the rest of us are spending extraordinary sums on decrepit old houses, which we proceed to live in. When we move house we are forced to become small-time speculators in a way that is likely to be more frightening than titillating, because it brings us into direct contact with the injustices of the market. But the market is the one thing that property porn can never be open about.

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

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