How NOT to buy a house: Dave Hughes purchases The Block property

Dave Hughes was delighted to secure The Block’s winning property with a $3.07 million bid. But it was a textbook example of what not to do.

Comedian Dave Hughes bought the house by The Block's winning couple, Josh Barker and Elyse Knowles. Photo: Channel 9

As infotainment, Channel Nine’s The Block was exceptionally good fun this season — as a guide to residential property investment it may even be useful.

Certainly, Comedian Dave Hughes, offered a textbook example of how NOT to buy a house.

Hughes caught the limelight last Saturday when he paid $447,000 over the reserve on a property in Elsternwick, Melbourne which had been featured in the show. Hughes produced a knockout $3.07 million bid.

The Block house by Josh and Elyse in Elsternwick, Melbourne.

But you don’t want to be known as someone who breaks records paying the highest price for a property — you actually want to be buying at the lowest possible price. On that basis, the impressive investors here are the sellers, Elyse Knowles and Josh Barker, who put in the hard yards renovating and marketing their property.

Photographed earlier this week grinning in the spa bath of the five-bedroom home, Hughes’ $3.07 million bid was reportedly the highest amount paid for a residence in the entire 14-series history of the show.

It looks like he has instantly overcapitalised on what he plans as an investment property.

Luxurious ... one of the bedrooms in Dave Hughes’ new Elsternwick home.

The average house price in the suburb Hughes just sunk his $3m into is $1.79m — Hughes surely knows this … he lives in the area.

What’s more, he may also know that house prices are flattening just now with industry estimates suggesting that the average price gain Melbourne homeowners can hope for between now and 2020 is 10 per cent. (This was the city forecast from Oxford Economics released just last week).

Perhaps Hughes spent what looks like about half a million too much on the property because he wanted some positive publicity — if that is the explanation for the move, then only Hughes will ever know if it was worth it.

The bathroom in Josh and Elyse’s winning The Block house.

Certainly he would not be the first celebrity to use The Block for promotion purposes: In fact, if you have been watching the show long enough you might remember the late electronics retailer John Ilhan of Crazy John’s started that trend more than a decade ago when he had an employee in a Crazy John’s mascot outfit buy an apartment in Sydney.

So it might be worth the risk for a comedian such as Hughes to overpay for a house that features in a TV show ... for anyone else though, it would be, well, a joke.