Danny Wallis dominates The Block auction for second year running

Wallis bought Mitch and Mark’s Block-winning home as well as Tanya and Vito’s and Kirsty and Jesse’s, for a combined total of $12.2 million.

That’s slightly more than the near-$12 million he spent buying three apartments at last year’s Block auction.

And his love of bizarre, specific-to-the-cent bids continued this year – he bought Mitch and Mark’s house for $4,044,444.44, Tanya and Vito’s for $3.8 million – and one cent, and Kirsty and Jesse’s for $4,401,523.67.

Wallis – who has an estimated net worth of $120 million – has history with Mitch and Mark, having purchased their property on their original 2019 season for $3.374 million.

And for the second year running, Wallis will donate one of his purchased houses to charity – Tanya and Vito’s home will be gifted to My Room Children’s Cancer Charity, where it’ll be used as accommodation for children battling cancer and their families.

Block viewers with long memories might remember Wallis’ flamboyant antics during the 2012 South Melbourne season of the show, where he purchased one of the properties for $1.4 million while flanked by women in T-shirts emblazoned with his company’s logo.

It was that stunt and his penchant for bizarre, confusing bids that saw him labelled a “a bit of a nuisance” by Block buyer’s advocate Frank Valentic at the show’s 2019 auctions.

But Wallis had some choice words of his own: He insisted he never even watched The Block and complained that the auction had been “slow” and “stupid.”

“I’ve never been at an auction where people get five minutes think time,” he said.

“Danny is a local businessman here in Melbourne … We’ve seen him at a Block auction before, and he has a tactic of confusing everyone in the crowd,” Block presenter Shelley Craft explained during the 2019 finale, after Wallis offered a bid that left the auctioneer flummoxed: $3,308,050. The auctioneer quipped that it was “$3,308,000 and half a litre of petrol.”

Starting his career at ANZ, Wallis then founded I.T. service management company DWS in 1991, which has since grown to encompass offices around Australia and New Zealand. Wallis is the CEO and Managing Director.

And this may explain why Wallis is so eager to flash the cash on The Block: In September 2020 DWS was bought by Indian tech giant HCL Technologies for $126 million in cash.

Wallis dropped a bombshell in a radio interview after last year’s Block buying spree, revealing that he hadn’t even fully inspected the three houses he bought.

“I don’t actually like going in a lot of houses I buy, because I don’t like seeing what people live like. I just buy them on the outside,” he said.

He also revealed he only watches the Sunday night reveals on The Block, and doesn’t bother with the other episodes, hinting he’s not a big fan of the show.

“I don’t watch it, I find it a bit … yeah. I just watch the reveals.”

Originally published as Eccentric millionaire Danny Wallis buys three properties at The Block auction