It’s 11 a.m. on a rain-chilled May morning in Baltimore, and HGTV personality Mike Aubrey is repeatedly banging his bald pate up against the same stubborn issue: the color pink.

He’s showing Kris Lier, who is trying to sell her home, comparable homes in her neighborhood to convince her she has priced her home too high.

“It’s pink!” Lier exclaims the moment she peeks into her neighbor’s first-floor bathroom.

“But it’s a full and renovated bathroom,” Aubrey tells Lier.

“Pink!”

“It’s the same quality level as every bathroom in your house,” Aubrey reminds her.

“But it’s pink!”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t even have a bathroom on your first floor,” Aubrey snipes, in a rare moment of audible chagrin.

Off camera, Aubrey tells the crew, “It’s going to be a long day, man. I hope you ate your Wheaties.”

It’s the second day of shooting for an upcoming episode of Real Estate Intervention, and Aubrey is juggling his HGTV duties with the buzzing, beeping, and chiming BlackBerry on his belt that keeps mercilessly pelting out questions from his real-life Washington, D.C.-area clients.

On TV, Aubrey is the real estate industry’s Dr. Phil, a powder-domed gravelly baritone who uses Socratic grilling to nudge recession-battered sellers back to reality. Off screen, the only difference is a shinier noggin. His real-life assistants don’t apply his makeup—they help him sell property in the inner suburbs of Virginia and Northwest D.C.

“I’m a real estate agent who’s trying to learn how to be a TV person, not a TV person pretending to be a real estate agent,” says the black-draped Aubrey, while a makeup artist airbrushes a thin layer of flesh-colored mist onto his head. “I’m a pretty straight shooter. I don’t necessarily fluff things up a whole lot—I kind of call it like I see it. Clients appreciate my candor, and they know I’m going to get the job done.”

His approach to negotiations—perhaps even more than his tinge of celebrity—have pushed Aubrey’s home sales into the stratosphere. In the first quarter, he was the 13th-highest-grossing Re/Max agent in the U.S. He hasn’t calculated the dollar figures himself yet, but they’re most likely enormous. Let’s put it this way: In 2009, not including his other team members’ transactions, he sold more than $30 million worth of real estate. That made him just the 75th-highest-grossing Re/Max agent.

While he’s grateful for HGTV’s exposure—he films 26 episodes a year—Aubrey can’t attribute all or even most of his business success to his appearances on three HGTV series.

Even before his debut—on HGTV’s Get It Sold in 2008—Aubrey sold $20 million of property in 2007. “Real estate is very local,” Aubrey said. “A lot of the opportunities that I’ve been offered because of the show are from people all over North America, and I’m not licensed in any of those places.”