How House #5 bagged a record-breaking auction on The Block

From his perspective, the outcome seen on The Block 2022, which netted Tom Panos’ auction for western Sydney friends Omar and Oz a $1.6 million payday and left other contestants high and dry, is one that’s now playing out every weekend.

“The market’s not great. But then, for some reason, some properties get astonishing money. Not only are they getting what they used to get, they’re getting more,” Mr Panos said.

From his perspective, there were two reasons why Omar and Oz saw such an astonishing result.

The first was the property itself.

And the second was the fact that it had two people that went on a bidding frenzy — and who wanted to be on television.

“Both those people knew that everyone is watching … prime-time TV,” the auctioneer acknowledged.

“You need to remember that this is highly edited on TV — there [are] a lot of edits.

“Did you know that Danny held my auction up by 40 minutes — he wasn’t there.

“The producers kept saying, ‘just wait, just wait.’ You are talking about sensationalism on TV — a guy making a late entrance with his entourage and his dogs.

“You’ve got another guy that’s pulled up in a Lamborghini, and what you’ve got is a narrative; The guy from The Block and the new man with the new money. The changing of a guard.”

From the auctioneer’s perspective, the reason he was able to achieve such a strong result for Omar and Oz was that “two people wanted it badly” — even though it wasn’t just for them to live in.

“They wanted it because they knew everyone was watching,” he said.

Reflecting on the different results achieved between last year’s television series and this year’s, Mr Panos also expects that if The Block auctions had been held in February 2022 — and not in November 2022 — it could have been an entirely different ballgame.

“There would have been more people bidding,” he said.

“This time last year, I did the auction for Luke and Josh — I would have had two to three times the number of bidders. They were flying left, right, and centre.

“If you want to talk about a short auction — my auction last time was shown for about 45 seconds.

“I went up about a million bucks in like 30 seconds. There was FOMO, there was craziness, and you had your normal, traditional buyers bidding with the celebrity buyers.”

While the 2021 competition created some “fierce” bidding, Mr Panos acknowledged that the timing of the latest auctions could not have been more different.

With the “dragon” that is inflation needing to go down from 8 per cent to 3 per cent — and in an area where the median property value is “nowhere near” the reserve prices required to sell this year’s houses featured on The Block, the auctioneer matter-of-factly conceded that “all these things impacted the price”.