Dave Hughes hits back at Block rumour that’s dogged him for six years

Dave Hughes has been dogged by rumours ever since he bought a Block house in 2017 – now, he’s set the record straight on-air.

Comedian and radio host Dave Hughes famously bought one of the houses from The Block in 2017 – and ever since then, he’s been dogged by rumours that he overpaid for the property.

Hughes hit back at the speculation on-air on Monday, as his co-host on 2DAY FM’s Hughesy, Ed & Erin breakfast show, Erin Molan, queried him about how his investment was performing.

Hughes paid $3.067 million for the five-bedroom home in Elsternwick, built by contestants Josh and Elyse in the 2017 season of Nine’s long-running reno show.

That was a whopping $447,000 over the reserve, leading to much talk over the years that Hughesy had overspent.

Dave Hughes, big Block buyer.

Erin Molan begs Hughesy to tell him his valuation.

Molan told her co-host on-air that a recent value estimate of the property that she’d found online put it 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.

But 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.

In the months after his big November 2017 purchase, even Hughes himself had conceded that he might have overpaid for the property.

He told Stellar magazine in February of 2018 that the bank had valued the property at “much less” than he paid.

Hughesy with Josh and Elyse after purchasing their Block home. Picture: Channel NINE

“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.”

And in September of 2018, he told his then-co-host Kate Langbroek that he’d “copped so much flak” over the purchase.

“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.”

Reading from the article, Hughes said, “Based on our assessment we think Hughesy has paid anywhere between $417,000 and $517,000 too much. We’re confident it’s closer to the $500,000 mark.”

This year’s Block homes will go under the hammer this weekend, with the results to be aired in the season finale on Sunday. It comes after last year saw the most dramatic auction results in the show’s history, with winners Omar and Oz scoring almost $1.7 million in profits from their record-breaking win, while another couple made just $20,000 in profits and several other houses failed to sell at auction.