Dave Hughes sets the record straight over famous Block house purchase
Dave Hughes has hit back at long-standing rumours that he grossly overpaid for his house in Melbourne at The Block auctions.
The radio host addressed the speculation on 2DAY FM’s Hughesy, Ed & Erin breakfast show, as his co-host Erin Molan queried him about how the investment property was performing.
In 2017, Hughesy bought the five-bedroom home in Elsternwick, built by contestants Josh and Elyse on Nine’s long-running reno show, for $3.067 million: a whopping $447,000 over the reserve.
Given the steep increase of the price, the purchase of the house led to a lot of talk that Dave Hughes had overspent.
Molan told her co-host on-air that a recent value estimate of the property that she’d found online put the home at $3.4 million.
Six years on from his purchase and with inflation, stamp duty and other factors weighted, Hughes noted that that $300,000-odd increase in value would actually put him at a loss.
However, Hughes said he had recently had the house valued himself, and the news was much better: He was told it is currently worth around $5 million.
After the purchase of the house, even Hughes himself conceded that he may have spent much more than what the house was worth.
In an interview with Stellar magazine in February 2018, he said that the bank had valued the property at “much less” than he paid.
“I went to get a bank loan the other day and they haven’t valued it the same as I paid for it, which is fine, but annoying because there were five bidders,” he said.
He said it was “enough less that it made me annoyed”.
“For f**k’s sake … I just think it’s good value and in a few years’ time people are going to be going, ‘Well, f**k, didn’t he do well with it!’ I am playing the long game, all right? That is what I say to my wife, anyway.”
In September of 2018, he told his then-co-host Kate Langbroek that he’d “copped so much flak” over the purchase.
He said, “It was ridiculous and it’s gone on and on and on. A lot of experts weighed into my purchase … There are articles that have been written all year having a go at me. One article from one mob called Property One or something, they had a dinner party discussion about how I paid too much.”
Image credits: Nine