The first two results of this year’s Block auctions show that we are in for a roller-coaster finish, with one team taking home the biggest profit in Block history, and another winning a bit.
All-season favorites Tom and Sarah-Jane had won the right to choose the order of the auction in Sunday’s final, pipping rivals Omar and Oz to the top spot, a move that proved to be backfired when the boys broke everything. blog records
After all five teams received the same reserve ($4.08 million), serial Block buyer and computer billionaire Danny Wallis bought Omar and Oz’s house for $5,666,666.66.
Wallis had been locked in a bidding war with a mystery man who arrived in a Lamborghini, greeting Omar and Oz with a hug before dropping some big bids and apparently disappearing for the second auction.
Wallis’ win gave them a staggering $1,586,666.66 in profits, instantly making them the most successful team in blog history by a large margin.
The only other team to ever break the $1 million mark is 2020 winners Jimmy and Tam, who scored $1.066 million.
Scott Cam was stunned by the incredible first auction result, announcing the boys’ massive profits: “Someone at Channel Nine is going to lose their job.”
It remains to be seen if another one this year blog couples may surpass their early lead, but they certainly won’t be Tom and Sarah-Jane, who led the auctions just after Omar and Oz.
Danny Wallis also bought their property, but for the much lower price of $4,100,000.99, giving them a profit of only $20,000 (and ninety-nine cents) for their three months of hard labor. The Block.
It was a shock result for a pair who Scott Cam insisted had worked their hardest all season and looked to be having a dream run, scoring wins with the judges to their perfect final score at landscaping week.
While Omar and Oz’s profits were immediately broken blog story, Tom and Sarah-Jane’s disappointing result saw them earn the lowest profit a blog house has done since series 9 in 2014.
“It wasn’t in our future,” said a tearful Sarah-Jane after the hammer fell. Tom said this, even though he didn’t expect to make a lot of money The Blockgiven the time of leaving their jobs they would leave at a “massive loss”.
Watching, all the other contestants seemed affected.
“I just feel crushed without you… You didn’t deserve this. We deserved much more. I don’t know what’s going on,” Scott Cam said.
These wildly disparate results come on the heels of growing concerns about how much (or little) profit teams can make after this year’s mammoth. blog season
There were tense scenes at the start of the episode as the teams’ $4.08 million bookings were revealed, after each team seemed convinced they would get bookings as low as $3.8 million.
“This reserve would be great if we had buyers willing to pay between 4 and 4.4, but we don’t have those buyers. There’s a lot of interest, but no interest in the 4 million,” contestant Rachel said.
But Scott Cam, who revealed this week he had problems with Nine after last season’s bookings were cut, stood his ground.
“No one has ever been happy with the reserve prices in the last 18 seasons. Last year everyone was up in arms. It would be a riot. As it turned out, everyone was wrong. The reserve prices were correct,” he told them.
But the clearly upset contestants were unconvinced, pointing out how different the housing market is to 12 months ago.
There were even uglier scenes after Tom and Sarah-Jane revealed the running order of the auction, with Omar and Oz in particular furious that they had been selected to go first.
“I straight up hate them,” Omar told Oz afterward. “I can’t stand his little bald head.”
Meanwhile, there is a worrying recent precedent ahead of the final, with The Block New Zealand’s most recent season ended in absolute disaster last month.
The winning pair fetched just NZ$4,000 (A$3,046) in a record low auction result for the Kiwi version of the franchise.
Fortunately, they also received NZ$100,000 in prize money for coming out on top. Fellow contestants weren’t so lucky, with the second-placed couple making a profit of just NZ$100 (A$76) after their house was sold.
Even the old one blog Contestants were worried about how the auctions would play out: Kirsty Lee Akers, who raised $301,523 on the show with her husband Jesse Anderson last year, told Woman’s Day last week she had a “bad feeling” about the auctions.
“Interest rates have skyrocketed and the market has cooled, plus everyone says these homes will sell for $5 million, but some of the best homes sold recently in this area [the Macedon Ranges in Victoria] he only made about $2 million. That’s a big price difference.”
For at least one team, those fears have proven unfounded, but for another, it’s a brutal end to their time in what has been the program’s most grueling season to date.
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