Tara Ward speaks to The Block NZ 2020 winners about being underdogs, keeping secrets, and their astonishing win.

Tim Cotton and Arthur “Arty” Gillies are sitting in a newly renovated townhouse in the Auckland suburb of Point Chevalier. It’s auction night on The Block NZ and host Mark Richardson is sitting a safe two metres away, while on a screen behind him, a Ray White NZ auctioneer is about to change Tim and Arty’s lives forever.

Eighteen months of blood, sweat and tears on The Block NZ has come to this: a group Zoom and a socially distanced party for three inside a fancy house with great indoor/outdoor flow.

The opening offer is $200,000 over Tim and Arty’s reserve. Three minutes of fierce bidding follows, before House Four sells for $2.825 million, giving the best mates a profit of $660,000. It’s a record breaking amount, far surpassing the $380,000 profit set by 2016 winners Sam and Emmett. Tim and Arty don’t know it yet, but they’ve just won The Block NZ.

“Our hearts were just racing the whole time, my palms were so sweaty. We were sitting on that couch for what felt like an eternity,” Tim tells me over Zoom, the day after the grand finale screened on Three. “Once that initial bid came in, it washed away all that fear and dread that we’d been hanging on to for so long. We’re just shell shocked. It’s surreal.”

It’s not a bad result for two blokes in their 20s who hadn’t renovated a room before they went on the show. Unemployed and “in a bit of financial strife”, Tim signed up for The Block NZ and managed to persuade “sucker” Arty to join him. Arty wasn’t convinced, but the pair moved from one stage in the audition process to the next until there was no turning back.

Having no construction experience, Arty was initially daunted by the experience. “You’ll notice in the first episodes I’m just standing there on the side like I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says. “But it was fun to be on TV together to begin with.” Then the first Covid-19 lockdown hit, the show was postponed for a year, and everything changed. “When we came back this year after the Covid break, we’d invested a lot more into the whole experience. It was like, now we need to make this count.”

Covid-19 restrictions meant the auctions – usually filmed live in front of a large audience – had to be pre-recorded and held online. The quieter atmosphere didn’t dampen buyer enthusiasm, with the other three teams selling their homes for profits of $590,000, $478,000 and $422,000. The same pandemic pressures that caused the season to be delayed and postponed proved to be a strange blessing, meaning The Block NZ houses were selling at the apparent peak of a runaway housing market.

Given the capital growth of properties in Point Chevalier rose 29.6% in the past 12 months, Tim and Arty were pleased their property had a relatively low reserve of $2.165 million. They loved House Four from the start because of its privacy and natural sunlight, and were surprised no other team wanted it. “Maybe that was because we painted the first room green, and that put everyone off it,” Arty jokes.

This year’s success is in stark contrast to last season’s grand finale, when three of the four teams failed to win a single dollar on auction night. Tim feels for those teams. “We know the struggle and the amount of effort that goes into actually just completing this,” Tim says. “You put your reputation on the line as much as your body, so yeah, we’re just overwhelmed, eh.”

Tim and Arty’s own reputations took a hit early on, after their first room was slammed by the judges. “We definitely got portrayed as the kind of halfwit underdogs who came in with not much hope,” Tim says. They embraced their role as the class clowns, bringing a much needed sense of silliness to the season and even gifting House Three a large black and white nude photograph of Tim to adorn the walls. “If the new owner wants me to autograph that, I can,” Tim says.

But between the wacky challenges and dress-ups, Tim and Arty got the job done. The pair grew in confidence and began to win room reveals, and were thrilled the judges voted their house the best on the block. By the time The Block NZ finished, Tim and Arty had proved they had the skills and perseverance to achieve great things. All they needed was to sell the house.

Anything can happen on The Block NZ auction night. Tim and Arty had to sit through three more auctions, knowing the other teams could still beat their huge profit to win The Block NZ and claim the extra $100,000 in prize money. It wasn’t until the fourth and final auction stalled that Tim and Arty knew they’d won. “We’re so stoked that the other teams pushed it really close and all made a good amount,” Tim says. “They’ve been so good to us along the way, so we’re sharing in their success as well.”

Then came the biggest challenge of all: keeping their massive win secret for a week. They told no-one. Still in Auckland level three lockdown, the pair used Tim’s birthday as an excuse to celebrate with their flatmates and then went for a surf. “There were just the two of us out there on our own, just having glances at each other and just like ‘argh’. It was unreal,” Tim says.

Sunday night’s episode gave them a chance to celebrate again, this time with their families during a special outdoor screening. “We were trying to be subtle, filming the moment our families saw the house hit $2.4 million straight off the bat,” Arty says. “It was cool to see that and know we were going to pull through, and just hold those poker faces a little bit longer.” Those reactions were made sweeter by the difficulties created by several lockdowns, with Arty having resigned from his job to appear on the show and Tim living in seven different homes over the last year and a half.

Tim and Arty know this win will change their lives. “That was the realisation we had in that moment during the auctions,” Arty says, while Tim reckons they never anticipated having such a sum of money at this point in their lives, having both been “dawdling along”. They’re keen to use their winnings to invest outside of Auckland, to travel and then do up their new property over summer. “We’re pretty keen to get on the ladder as soon as we can,” Tim says.

Tim and Arty did the mahi and got the treats, and their friendship appears undamaged by the pressures of reality TV. “The closest we got to an argument was when I wore some sort of long johns and shorts and Tim was questioning my dress sense,” Arty says. They’ve been mates since they were 10, and reckon that despite its many challenges, The Block only helped their friendship to blossom.

“It’s hard to really put into words how tough it is,” Tim says of the whole experience. “I think we stayed true to ourselves as well, which is a big thing for us, we didn’t want to get too corrupted by The Block. Reality TV can be a hard one to come out on the good side of.” Looking back, there’s no regrets. “We’re pretty proud of what we achieved.”