Lexi Cerretti

Chase International

Lexi is a Chase International Incline Village, Nevada real estate agent who has a website www.BuyTahoeHomes.com.
When HGTV wanted to do their first Tahoe Homes episode of "My House is Worth What?" they found Lexi through her website.

Be sure to watch for the airing of the first episode on HGTV on September 2 at 11pm, then will re-run regularly..

Lexi’s Story:
Holly Schwartz called me one afternoon saying she'd seen my website and liked that I had construction experience doing remodels. My husband is a general contractor in Incline Village, and from what she read about me, she though I would be great on the show. She asked if I could help recruit homeowners whom had recently remodeled, and ask them if they wanted to participate on the show. I thought of my friends Jim and Caroline Kaplan who'd recently done a large master addition over their garage, and they mentioned mutual friends. Ross and Sarah McMahan whose twin boys go to daycare with my 2 year old daughter.

Both couples said they'd like to do it. My dad is a cameraman, so on his next visit, he helped me produced demo tapes at each of the homeowners homes, detailing what they had done and getting "air time" to show HGTV how we would all appear on camera.

Holly had the demos approved, and they schedule shoot dates for both homes.

Filming was really fun! I felt like a part of the crew, working with the cameraman and producer to get the right positioning for each take. Kendra Todd, the host of the show, was the winner on the Apprentice third season, and got to work closely with Donald Trump building his home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was one of the top producing brokers in the US in her early 20's, benefiting from Florida's real estate boom. She is very dynamic and quick thinking on set, so she and I played off of each other's ideas on how to approach the positives and negatives of each room. She likes to improvise to keep the show very fresh and real, and it made for some fun out takes as well! I had my own ideas on what else the homeowners could do with their spaces, so it was fun to see their reactions to my plans of gutting and remodeling the kitchen or blowing out a wall here to enlarge a bedroom- met with wide eyes, of course. In all, I loved working with the crew and it was really fun for me to showcase my expertise in helping homeowners make the most of their most prized possession- their homes!

The most stressful part was taking over the homes of our two gracious families who allowed us to film. Both have children under the age of 2, and Caroline Kaplan was 9 months pregnant during the shoot! The producer wanted toys and personal belongings out of site, so a lot of "staging" had to be done last minute to get the homes looking picture perfect!

Chase's image and broad exposure in Tahoe helped add to my credibility. It was really time consuming but nice to see that the HGTV producers want real data to support the values and gave credence to what improvements really do add the most to a home. I studied reports on actual remodels done in our area and used their stats on % of value added to fine tune my numbers and give the owners accurate assessments of the value of their improvements. A lot goes into filming as I had to have all the data in mind as I put on my TV personality, exaggerating gestures and really hitting home the pluses and minuses of each home.