Property Ladder was a British show that ran during the boom years. I think that the last series (entitled Property Snakes and Ladders) was shown in 2009.
The format was that Sarah Beeney would follow the progress of an amateur property developer renovating a run down house, with the intention of making a fat profit.
The developer would almost inevitably have some crazy ideas, or an unfulfilled desire to be an interior designer. Beeney would point out how things could be done better, and almost always be ignored.
OK, there were a few times when I thought that she was wrong, or she was picking on something minor to create drama, but 90+% of the time she called it right.
We'd then see progress reports, with Beeney nagging the developer about their mistakes, and the budget invariably proving to have been optimistic. The house then gets valued, with the estate agents saying, "If the developer had taken the advice then it'd be a much nicer place." The developer looks smug, until she points out that all the gain was due to general market appreciation, and without that they'd have been stuffed.
The latter episodes tended to end with the house being worth less than the cost of buying and renovating it, or what the developer had hoped to achieve. This typically was met with, "We'll rent it until the market recovers."
I reckon that it was one of the better renovation shows from a period when there was a huge amount of "property porn" on British TV. It's not as good as Grand Designs, though I don't think that anything else comes close to that, but it's probably worth watching if there's nothing on, and it is educational.
