Ever since local real estate broker Ati Williams was featured in a video on the New York Times website in 2014, she says she’s received lots of pitches about potential television opportunities—including one show called “Buy A House, Get A Spouse.”

But it wasn’t until last year that she and her husband Rob got an offer that intrigued them enough to call in the cameras.

Bethesda-based production company Half Yard Productions “really opened the door to seeing what [Ati] wanted to do rather than shoehorn her into some preconceived show with a lot of drama, like Real Housewives,” Rob says.

“We kept telling them, ‘Look, we’re not interesting enough for television,'” adds Ati. But Half Yard disagreed. After presenting the idea of a Williams-helmed show to home improvement channel HGTV in April, Half Yard filmed the pilot over the summer as they renovated a row house in Petworth. DC Flippers will premiere on the network on January 8, 2017 at 2 p.m.

The Williams own DC Home Buzz, the first area brokerage to offer full services for a flat fee.

When Ati and Rob met in 2006, she was a real estate agent and he was a defense contractor with no experience in their current profession.

“I was renting at the time and complaining about the landlord raising the prices every year,” Rob recalls. “Ati was like, ‘Why don’t you buy a house?'” So he did.

And four months into their relationship, when many couples are still figuring out whether to leave toothbrushes at one another’s places, the two of them bought their first investment property, which they fixed up and rented out, “because we’re crazy,” jokes Ati.

After that, they continued to work on real estate projects together. Ati got a broker’s license, and Rob got a real estate license. About three years ago, the two transitioned from buying their own rentals to helping other people buy and sell property, though they continue to rent out 11 units.

Currently, they’re working on three different properties—two in Mount Pleasant, where they live, and one in Adams Morgan. They say their favorite D.C. neighborhood is Brookland, which has “cool old houses with great bones that are awesome to work on,” says Rob.

The idea of house flipping is about as controversial as it is popular in D.C. More than a quarter of homes sold in the city in 2015 were turned over in three years or less. Three D.C. neighborhoods, including Brookland, made a 2015 Redfin list of neighborhoods with the highest flip gains. Petworth took the number one slot, with an average gain of $337,000. The city’s public housing authority has even gotten in on it.

The quality of the renovations been a consistent issue, though. In June, the D.C. Office of the Attorney General reached a settlement with one Virginia couple over nonexistent or substandard construction work.

“It’s a valid point for people to question flips,” says Ati. “As a broker I’ve seen some really shoddy work during home inspections—you turn on the light for the kitchen and the garbage disposal has gone off.” The couple says they emphasize the importance of quality control at DC Home Buzz.

By increasing home prices, flipping can also push out long time residents. Ati says that there still hasn’t been an honest conversation between city politicians, developers, and residents about how to deal with a changing D.C.

“There’s been a lot of attacking, but if everyone just comes to the table and realizes that we all want the same thing—a vibrant, economically stable, diverse city—we can go about gentrification in a responsible way,” she says.

As far as skeletons in the closet go, the Williams duo says that, at one property they purchased, they found a human skull in a basement room.

“I was trying to convince myself it was a fake replica but it turned out to be an actual human skull,” says Rob. The house’s previous owner “was in World War II and it turned out this was a skull from a Japanese soldier.”

They got in touch with the Japanese embassy, which has a process in place to repatriate these war trophies.

“In the meantime, I didn’t want to walk around with a human skull,” says Rob. “I said, ‘Okay, where can I put this skull where nobody is going to mess with it?” He picked the house’s stove, but sure enough, someone checking out the house opened it up. “I definitely got a call about that,” he says.

Nothing that macabre makes its way into the pilot episode.

“Our conflict is mostly around design choices,” says Rob. “Ati is the creative one on the team and I’m the one who actually has to translate her vision into reality.”

But don’t expect the kind of drink-throwing that’s become de rigueur for many reality shows. “HGTV is the family-friendly channel,” says Ati. “It’s the Adele of television.”

So far, they’ve only filmed the pilot of DC Flippers. If HGTV chooses to pick up the show for a series, it would air in about a year’s time.

“It’s interesting to me because I’m a complete planner, but this is the one thing that’s like, whatever will be will be,” says Ati.

They say what differentiates DC Flippers from other home improvement shows is its setting. “We’re dealing w home renovations in a major urban area,” says Rob. “I’m most excited about the opportunity to showcase D.C. and what it’s like to renovate a home in D.C.”