Add CategoryTHE Block’s overhaul of the infamous Gatwick Hotel is expected to boost St Kilda’s housing market and hospitality scene, ultimately making Fitzroy St “as popular as Chapel St”.
Property experts say “the Gatwick effect” — a renaissance of the once-thriving dining strip and its surrounds tipped to follow the rooming house’s closure and redevelopment — has started in anticipation of the show’s return to Channel 9 tonight.
Off-screen, the five teams have turned the former hotbed of violence and drug use into a high-end apartment complex.
The Block regular, Advantage Property Consulting director Frank Valentic, said the finished products oozed wow factor, with the top-floor pads boasting city views and high ceilings, and those on the first and second floors offering huge 250sq m of space that made them “the biggest apartments in Block history”.
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Mr Valentic and agents Michael Townsend of McGrath and David Wood of Hocking Stuart agreed the fully furnished flats should each fetch more than $2.5 million each.
CoreLogic records show Channel 9 paid $10 million for the heritage building, which was built as a luxury hotel in 1937, but came to be viewed by locals and the state government as an epicentre of crime.
“A lot of local families would avoid it. The shop vacancy rate in that part of Fitzroy St at one point got to 20 per cent, due to the lack of foot traffic,” Mr Townsend said.
“Now we’re seeing ‘leased’ signs in the windows of shops that have been vacant for some time.”
Mr Valentic said The Block team “had left a positive mark wherever they’ve gone”, breathing new life into South Yarra’s seedy Hotel Saville in 2015 and a derelict Port Melbourne soap factory in 2016.
Mr Wood — who sold Josh Barker and Elyse Knowles’s Block winning Elsternwick reno for $3.067 million last year — expected the latest project to restore Fitzroy as an eat street “as popular as the top end of Chapel St in Windsor”.
If the house-sized flats sold well at their televised auctions, it could inject confidence into St Kilda and St Kilda West’s housing markets, he said.
Mr Townsend said now was “a great time to buy St Kilda”, which also had The Espy hotel reopening, a $550 million beachside apartment development and The Block’s rumoured next project, the “scummy” Oslo Hotel on Grey St, to look forward to.
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