- Two townhouses from The Block NZ's cancelled season have sold for undisclosed sums.
- The properties, marketed with price expectations over $1.45m each, received multiple offers.
- Show producers bought the site for $6.25m but declined to say if costs were covered.
Two townhouses from Three's canned season of The Block NZ have sold, but producers have refused to say if they lost money on the project.
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The four-bedroom properties at 850 Beach Road, in Auckland's Browns Bay, were snapped up last month for an undisclosed sum.
Ray White agent Therese Leslie, who marketed the properties with colleague Jiang Kou, declined to give details of the sale but said the townhouses had price expectations of over $1.45 million each.
Inside one of the townhouses. It has an open-plan kitchen, with scullery, dining and living room. Photo / Supplied
She said she had received multiple offers for both townhouses, and that she was already fielding interest in the remaining two properties being sold by the Block producers.
Those four-bedroom townhouses are set to hit the market next week, with one for sale by negotiation and the other set for auction on February 5.
Mike Molloy, one of The Block NZ producers, told OneRoof he didn’t want to go into whether or not the sale prices covered the company’s costs.
“We are what we are, and we need to move on,” he said.
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“We’re certainly pleased with the response. They were very nice houses, well fitted out. Given the market, It’s a tough market, and there’s not a massive amount of confidence, so the fact that we got our sales is a bonus."
He added: “We’re happy that we moved them on.”
The Block production company, Warner Bros International Television Production Aotearoa NZ, bought 850 Beach Road in April 2022 for $6.25m, and even though an 11th season of the reality TV show was never officially commissioned by Three's parent company, Warner Bros Discovery, construction work on the site was given the green light.
However, Warner Bros Discovery cancelled the show last year, as part of a cost-cutting exercise that also resulted in the closure of Three’s news division, Newshub, and the loss of hundreds of jobs.
The Block’s producers bought the Browns Bay site in 2022 for $6.25m. Photo / Supplied
The cast of The Block NZ 2022. The show has now been axed. Photo / Warner Bros Discovery
The Block production company was forced to complete the townhouses it started to build and listed the first two for sale at the end of last year.
Leslie said the quality of the homes was "outstanding, the bedrooms are big and the bathrooms are lovely".
She said one of the townhouses was snapped up by a family, while the other was sold to a downsizer. Settlement is not until February, but one of the buyers is already moving in this week under a license to occupy.
Shane Coote, director of Ray White Mairangi Bay, said selling the townhouses one at a time had helped.
“The Block guys said, ‘Here’s the first one, take to it auction and we’ll see what happens’. It was a good result and that led to the second one. Just doing it step by step is better.”
He didn't know whether or not the houses would have sold for more if they’d been on the television show.
“They’ve been professionally finished, you might argue they are better products. But then the show comes with a lot more hype, more eyes on it,” he said.
Coote added that while house prices have been a “little bit of a roller coaster” he didn’t think the price was hugely different from what it could have been in 2023.
“There’s obviously been more than one sold, so that’s where the market is seeing [the price]. It’s not like there’s been one freak sale or anything like that.”
Leslie said the Block NZ connection had boosted buyer interest.
“We’ve had more hits online – probably 30% more than what we would normally expect,” Leslie said, adding that the fast sale of the first two Beach Road properties was notable given that there were nearly 40 more similar places for sale within a 2km radius.
Last year, when the first townhouses went on the market, Molloy told OneRoof that completing the build had been expensive. “We bought the site at the height of the market, that was what the market was at the time,” he said.
“[Everything is] fully paid for and there’s no talent doing work inside. None of that’s happening – it’s all done by the pros.”
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