As the Australian property market booms and borders re-open, Selling Houses Australia returns to Aussie screens. The 14th season of the local production kicks off on Wednesday, March 30 at 8:30 pm on Foxtel‘s Lifestyle and On Demand. Host and real estate expert Andrew Winter is back for the new season, alongside two new presenters: interior design expert Wendy Moore and landscape designer Dennis Scott are jumping behind the wheel after Charlie Albone and Shaynna Blaze departed from the long-running show in 2020.
Mediaweek spoke to Wendy Moore, general manager of Foxtel Lifestyle and host of Selling Houses Australia, about her first season on the show and tackling some of the most unique houses that the format has seen.
When Albone and Blaze left the show, they left big shoes to fill. Even though it hasn’t been long since they joined the production, Moore says that she and Scott have found their feet.
“It’s a big production with a very close-knit team, so parts of it were really overwhelming, and parts of it were just like you’d come home. So I really enjoyed that, and I think Dennis really enjoyed that as well. He keeps on saying he’s really missed that team atmosphere that he had in football, and I get it. It’s really nice.”
As Foxtel’s most successful original Lifestyle series, Moore says that there are a few points that bring the audience to Selling Houses Australia.
“The first thing is, it’s always really positive. Even though Andrew can be pretty blunt and pretty scathing, he does it in such a positive way. There’s no drama, there’s no cliffhanger. We’re making people’s lives better, and it’s just nice to see and to know exactly what you’re going to get – it delivers every time. I love it.”
Wendy Moore, Andrew Winter, and Dennis Scott
Pre-pandemic, the Selling Houses Australia team would fly all over the country to fix up houses. As covid restrictions kicked in, however, production found themselves with a whole new set of hurdles.
“We didn’t have any issues with people getting Covid, but it was the border closures, the lockdowns, and when they stopped all building that impacted us,” Moore said. “Probably the biggest impact was when things started getting a bit hairy again, Dennis and Andrew are both from Queensland and they came down to Sydney so we could finish one of the houses. Then the Queensland border shut, even to its own residents, which none of us saw coming.
“They were stuck here for months. Honestly, we could have made a show out of this odd couple stuck together. Andrew is so finicky and sarcastic and particular about how he likes things. Dennis is like a big teddy bear, a gentle giant and footy player. Andrew doesn’t even know what shaped ball is used in the football that Dennis plays!”
While being stuck in New South Wales was not a part of the original plan, Moore says that the team made the most of the experience.
“I was in Sydney as well and so all of us got really, really close. In some ways, we’ve said that’s been the silver lining to it all. It meant that some of the houses that we wanted to do in Melbourne we couldn’t do because we couldn’t get down to Victoria. One of the houses in Queensland we couldn’t do for the same reason. We just tried to cover as much of the country as we could and tried to get as far into New South Wales as we could to get that variation.”
Regardless of how far the team could travel, the Australian housing market is hitting new heights every day. It’s almost a surprise that the team found any houses at all that were unable to sell – however they did find them, and Moore says that the houses of season 14 presented their own challenges.
“Generally, Selling Houses is about people that are desperate to sell and can’t sell – and there are just not many people who can’t sell a house at the moment, everything is selling. So that’s meant that we had fewer houses to see, but the houses that we have seen are way more desperate than we’ve seen before. There’s a quote from Andrew, ‘we could put a paper bag in the street and sell it right now,’ and yet these homes aren’t selling. I think that that’s given us the extreme in the houses that we’ve got because there are so many problems. I kind of think it’s made it more interesting in a way.”