Drew Scott, the Property Brother who wanted to act and ended up selling houses in a suit

Drew Scott

Photo: Christopher Michel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 28, 1978 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation	Television presenter, real estate agent and producer
Known for	Love Hurts, Possession, The Christmas Parade
Awards	Leo (shared) · Habitat Humanitarians, Habitat (shared)

On Property Brothers the division of labour has never moved. Jonathan swings the sledgehammer; Drew wears the suit, shows buyers the house they cannot afford and negotiates the one they can. It works as a job description and as a costume. The twin who sells houses on HGTV is the one who walked away from real estate to become an actor, gave himself a single year to make it in Vancouver and came out of it owing more than a hundred thousand dollars. Television handed him the career he wanted by casting him as the man he had tried to stop being.

Andrew Alfred Scott arrived in Vancouver four minutes after his identical twin, Jonathan, and two years after their older brother, JD. Their father, Jim, had left Scotland as a teenager wanting to be the kind of cowboy he saw on television, and worked in film as an actor, stuntman and assistant director before moving the family to a horse farm in Maple Ridge, outside the city. On the farm the boys were paid to build and fix fences, decks and barns.

Drew, born on April 28, 1978, found his first obsession in basketball. He told GQ he practised four or five hours a day, and he made the team at the University of Calgary, where he studied kinesiology, only to be injured before the first season; he never played a game. At 25 an Alberta college recruited him. He lasted a few weeks and went back to the property business he and Jonathan had started as students after watching a Carleton Sheets infomercial. He took his real estate licence in 2004, the year the twins founded Scott Real Estate.

The acting had started earlier. As a teenager he picked up small parts in Breaker High and Madison, and worked as Tom Welling’s body double on Smallville. In January 2006 he left Jonathan in Calgary to run the company and moved back to Vancouver with a deadline: one year, acting and voice classes, jobs on film crews, all of it tracked in a colour-coded spreadsheet. By the end of it he was in debt and nowhere near where he had planned to be. The offers that followed were for hosting.

Cineflix offered him a format called Realtor Idol that was never made. The producers kept him for another idea, provisionally titled My Dream Home, and planned to pair him with a female co-host until they learned that he had a twin who renovated houses. They built the show around the pair instead. Property Brothers began on Canada’s W Network, was picked up by HGTV and became the root of a family of spin-offs: Buying and Selling, Brother vs. Brother, Property Brothers: At Home, Property Brothers: Forever Home, which has run past a hundred episodes, and Celebrity IOU. Kathleen Finch, then president of HGTV, called the twins the cable equivalent of box-office movie stars.

The brothers turned the airtime into a company. Scott Brothers Entertainment, founded in 2010, now produces their shows; the Scott Living furniture line launched on QVC in 2015 and had passed one hundred million dollars in revenue by the end of the following year. Their renovation guide Dream Home reached The New York Times bestseller list in 2016, and their joint memoir, It Takes Two: Our Story, followed in 2017. That autumn Drew competed alone on the 25th season of Dancing with the Stars with Emma Slater and finished fourth. On one night of his run, Jonathan burst into the middle of his jive.

That moment is the problem in miniature. Drew Scott has spent fifteen years as half of a brand, and the brand is the thing he is hired for. HGTV’s own promotion described the twins as good-looking, talented and ever-so-popular with the ladies. When scripted television calls, it mostly wants him as himself: in Playing House, in Girls5eva, and this year in the final season of Hacks, where the brothers race against Jean Smart‘s Deborah Vance on a celebrity edition of The Amazing Race. His most substantial film part, in Love Hurts, the 2025 action comedy that gave Ke Huy Quan his first lead, cast him as Jeff Zaks, a rival realtor who advertises his karate. Coverage of the film called it stunt casting, critics dismissed the film, and the man who once gave himself a year to become an actor ended up playing, with a black belt, a heightened version of his day job.

His marriage runs through the business too. He met Linda Phan at a Toronto Fashion Week event in 2010; she became creative director of Scott Brothers Entertainment, and they married in Italy on May 12, 2018, in a ceremony that mixed Scottish and Vietnamese traditions and became the TLC special Drew and Linda Say I Do. Their son, Parker, was born in 2022 and their daughter, Piper Rae, in May 2024. In 2017 Habitat for Humanity gave both brothers its highest honour, Habitat Humanitarians.

The past two years have kept the format busy. HGTV launched Chasing the West, in which the twins help families buy ranches, in July 2025, and Property Brothers: Under Pressure on March 15, 2026, fourteen episodes that opened with a couple who had lost their home in the Eaton fire. In April, Drew guest-starred in the season 19 finale of Murdoch Mysteries as Cecil Winchester, a part he described as charming and a little dangerous, and he hinted that the character could return.

The project carrying his own name points somewhere else. In September 2023 he joined the ownership group of the Vancouver Giants, the junior hockey club of his home city, announcing it as a homecoming for an “OG giant from Vancouver”. Hometown Giants, a six-episode Prime Video docuseries made by his company with Amazon MGM Studios, follows the club’s 2025-26 season, with Drew and his co-owner Michael Bublé chasing a first title since the 2007 Memorial Cup. Bublé says Ryan Reynolds, who had already put Wrexham on television, told them not to do it. All six episodes arrived worldwide on October 16, 2026.

Jonathan, meanwhile, taped a pilot in June for a CBS daytime talk show, Better! With Jonathan Scott, which is aiming at a fall 2027 launch and has not yet been picked up. Drew has no announced role in it. If it goes ahead, the brothers will spend a large part of the year apart on screen for the first time since Property Brothers began. Drew has a hockey club, a period detective series that may call him back, and the chance to show what the realtor in the suit does without his twin in the next room.

Featured Films

Possession (2009) — Love Hurts (2025) — as Jeff Zaks

Tags: actors, Michael Bublé, Drew Scott, Hometown Giants, Ke Huy Quan, TV presenters

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