The first Property Brother is born and it’s like a light appearing during the long night of an earth without Property Brothers. His name is Abraham, and from the moment of his birth there are murmurs about who he will partner with, which properties he will purchase and the renovations he will spearhead, and the media appearances that will follow.
Colin is born a year later, and it’s not apparent he even is a Property Brother until his second year of elementary school when he brings the deed to his parents’ home into show-and-tell and flips it for nearly three times the amount they’d paid a decade earlier. Abraham is the one who takes the ball and runs with it, securing new land on which to build a new home. The mother and father are pretty much just along for the ride.
With their fledgling businesses geographically overlapping so severely one might think the two boys would be at odds, but nothing could be further from the truth. Abraham and Colin are thick as thieves and do everything together, feeding and bathing one another and talking in hushed tones long into the night. They apply to business school when Colin is 11 and Abraham is 12, and they both get in, and they do each others' homework, quickly moving up through the ranks until they are teaching the classes while their professors watch in awed silence. When they graduate at the top of their class, perfectly tied with the highest grades ever recorded, they sell the school building and use the money to start their own business.
There was another brother born too, Gus, and he will become relevant later.
The Property Brothers are in their element. Here's how they do things. First, they purchase a property. Then, they visit the property and loudly remark on its positive and negative qualities. A process follows where the positive qualities are enhanced and the negative qualities utterly erased - this part is difficult to understand and not worth describing in detail. Finally, the brothers sell the property and make a hell of a lot of dough. They could use this dough for anything, but they always use it to buy more property. To do otherwise would be contrary to their nature.
Neither Abraham nor Colin has ever gone to a barber, but their identical black hairstyles are an inch and a half long and neatly slicked down. One of them wears a denim shirt and the other wears selvedge denim jeans. At all times, the one wearing the denim shirt wears dark pants, and the one wearing denim jeans wears a light patterned button-down shirt. It is impossible to say which brother is which. They orbit one another like sister stars with identical masses. They still live in their parents' home and sleep together in their childhood bedroom. At one point, they are seen dating beautiful women with white sweaters, and they marry, but soon their wives recede into the background radiation, and it's unclear if they were ever discrete objects to begin with.
Someone offers the Property Brothers a reality show on television, but they turn it down. They have everything they could possibly need. They have never flown on a plane; they drive black Ford Mustangs. They eat oatmeal for breakfast and steak for dinner. They have never gone to a library or movie theater, never been to a funeral or wedding (not even their own), never held a baby, never listened to music. The properties they own accumulate value at an impossible rate, baffling economists. The Property Brothers are ironclad. The gentle, masculine, beatific front they present is not actually a front but completely real and true. They have not said anything demeaning or rude about a person in their entire lives.
On the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of Abraham and Colin's business, Gus comes to visit. He has graduated from college with a degree in sociology. You can tell him apart by his hair, which is slightly curly, and his sneakers, which neither Abraham nor Colin would be caught dead in. Otherwise he is identical and somehow simultaneously the exact same age as the other two.
When Abraham opens the door to their parents' house and sees Gus, he smiles and says "It's great to see you! Let me get my brother." He closes and locks the door and goes into the garage. Colin is in his bedroom on the second story looking down out of the window at Gus.
For the next three years, the brothers have to use the Internet to buy and sell property. They work on their laptops at the living room table while their parents move to and fro. Colin contracts a scout to observe properties and report back to the brothers, and Abraham chooses to buy or sell based on the scout's info. The scout misses important details: the Property Brothers would never buy an ochre house, but they are told it's vermilion. For the first time in their lives, they begin to lose money. Meanwhile, Gus has died of exposure.
During the time the Property Brothers spend indoors, their business goes bankrupt and their names are dragged through the dirt. "Abraham" is known to buy houses with flooded basements, and the name "Colin" becomes synonymous with "house that has a gas leak." Everyone has forgotten that they ever had wives; no one would marry them now. The brothers are ruined.
However, something is about to happen that nobody would expect. It happens on a Sunday morning while their parents are at church. Colin is in the garage cleaning his Mustang with special soap, and Abraham is looking at paintings in the hallway. Suddenly, both brothers smell the familiar scent of their house burning. They run into the living room and see that their laptops have simultaneously ignited and that the blaze has consumed the table, the chairs, the carpet, the wainscoting, the cornices, the pilasters. Abraham and Colin embrace and the house collapses around them, kicking up a large cloud of ash.Â
When the dust settles the brothers straighten up, blinking, and walk through the wreckage of the destroyed house, past what used to be the front door and a loose pile of deteriorating human bones. They stand at the end of the driveway and look back at what used to be their refuge and their prison.
A limousine pulls up next to the brothers, and a man wearing a black suit gets out. "What happened here?" he asks.
"Recent renovations to this property have opened up basically infinite opportunities for land utilization," says Colin.
"The area is zoned for residential and you can pick up this lot for a song," says Abraham.
"This is a wonderful neighborhood with lots of walking trails and natural features," says Colin.
When the Property Brothers' parents return home, they see that their home is gone and another home is being built in its place by a new owner. They see that their sons have freed themselves from the pain of knowing themselves, from knowing not-themselves. They hold one another and weep with joy. Residents come out of the neighboring homes with folding tables, grills, and champagne. Everyone here deserves to be here. Everything is arranged in a way that makes sense visually. Jewel and earth tones. Granite and marble. The fingerprints of God lie across everything. These homes are also properties. These people are also brothers.
