The despair of failing contestants was palpable in The Block finale this year, and experts believe it was set in motion by a series of dud calls by the show. Supplied: Channel 9.
The Block’s winning auctioneer and a top Victorian real estate expert have revealed the show’s auction wipe out was a “phenomenal result” that could easily have been worse.
With a litany of mistakes kicking off when the site was bought a year before contestants started work, it was lucky to get three homes sold.
PropTrack data has raised questions over why the auction-centric show targeted a town where there had been just three other homes auctioned this year, and a total of four in the past 22 months.
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New Property Investment Professionals of Australia chair and prominent Victorian buyer’s advocate Cate Bakos said they would have almost immediately sidelined a local market by picking an area with such limited auction experience.
Ms Bakos said it was “1000 per cent” a misstep to try and use an auction sale in “an area that’s not receptive to it”.
“You have got to do your research and I don’t think they did, or they didn’t care about the local market,” she said.
“I doubt that they even had a vague bit of interest from local buyers.”
Britt and Taz’ celebrate their win after selling to an investor buyer. Picture: Channel 9.
Prominent buyer’s agent Cate Bakos said bad decisions made leading up to The Block auctions were a “cocktail of despair”.
Noting the homes were also near a “gigantic intersection”, Ms Bakos said everything about this season appeared to have been “poorly done” including: buying in a regional area near its peak, selling near the bottom of the market and overcapitalising on the builds in between.
“Everything about it was a cocktail of despair,” she said.
Ms Bakos added that trying to sell five very similar homes in such a short span using a sales method ill-suited to an area not used to such volume at the same time, the show had likely been lucky it hadn’t been an even weaker result.
One positive for the show was getting the order of homes right as they went under the hammer on the day, which ensured the best of bidding early on — and helped the contestants who did succeed.
The Block contestants Emma and Ben missed out under the hammer, with experts noting their reserve was too high as one of a littany of mistakes by the show.
However, she did note there was some credit due as The Block’s purchase in Mt Eliza for next season appeared far more sensible — though only if they opted to create family homes that would suit affluent buyers and complement elite schools in the suburb.
The Block’s Daylesford winning auctioneer Mark Nunn, who helped Britt and Taz’ to a $420,000 above reserve result, said all things considered only two auctions stalling was a good result for the season after producers overpriced the homes by about $400,000.
“If you look at it objectively, and strip the TV part out, to sell three houses under the hammer at auction for more than $3m there is a phenomenal result,” Mr Nunn said.
“The price was wrong. The houses were great houses, they were just too high on the price. Had they priced them as we were instructing them to, we would have sold them all under the hammer.”
Buxton Ballarat’s Mark Nunn believes auction reserves were set too high on The Block’s Daylesford season.
The Daylesford house of The Block contestants Han and Can is still for sale a week after the auction for the home on the show ended with it passing in.
The agent said they had been advocating a $2.6m reserve, not anywhere near $3m, and that he believed the three $3m-plus sales would still have occurred with lower asking prices and that the “whole narrative around the success of the show would have been different”.
Mr Nunn added that even the two other results achieved should have been celebrated, with $100,000 above reserve usually a cause for cheers for typical home sellers.
“It’s just because of recent years when bidding just got out of control … which is great for a couple of seasons, but it’s not reality,” Mr Nunn said.
Mr Nunn said while the local stats said auctioning wasn’t always the best way to go in Daylesford, the prospective buyers were all interstate or out of Melbourne and with the TV component it could still have worked — with lower reserves.
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