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When electrician Mitch Pryor appeared on reality renovation TV show Grand Designs: Transformations, he had an advantage that many home renovators don’t.
He had significant experience on construction sites, and both he and his wife, Corinne, had already bought, renovated and sold two properties before they turned an unloved 1950s bungalow into a multi-level luxury home in Melbourne’s east.
“I grew up watching shows like Backyard Blitz ... and they used to show you how to do things and inspire you to do your own things,” he said. “Now it’s just like he said, she said, then: buy this light fitting.”
With property prices high, interest in home renovations is growing. But experts warn many reality renovation shows make the process of updating a home look easier than it is, with neatly-edited timelines, sponsored products and an army of contractors at the ready.
“People are obsessed with the process of building,” Pryor said. “But I kind of want to see the reasoning around why people do things. I’ve learned so much from seeing other people’s mistakes.”
The Pryor family bought their Mitcham house in September 2023 for $1.1 million, and moved into the finished home on Australia Day in 2025.
Their journey was showcased as one of two renovation stories in the seasoner-opener of Grand Designs: Transformations in January this year.
The Pryors’ home is now listed with a price guide of $2.8 million to $2.98 million, hitting the market in March, a bit over a year after the family moved in.
Why did they decide to sell?
“Honestly, we love doing this so much that we want to make it a business,” Pryor said. “I just wanted to legitimise it and go into property development ... but with a bit of a twist.”
Mitch plans to use the capital from the sale of the house to jump-start Pryor State as a business.
“We’re going to do beautiful family homes,” he said. “And hopefully move in closer to the city and leverage off the sale of the house.”
Homes that are likely to be sold soon after an episode airs is something that Brooke Bayvel, supervising executive producer at Fremantle Australia, which produces the program for the ABC, said Grand Designs tries to avoid.
“It’s not in the spirit of the show,” she said. “It was certainly presented that they loved the house, and it was their forever home.”
A spokesperson from the ABC said the organisation was not aware that the house was for sale or of any plans for it to be sold after the program went to air.
The episode focused on how Mitch salvaged quality materials from worksites and Facebook Marketplace to get a luxury feel on what was ultimately a $700,000 budget.
“They were basically begging, borrowing and stealing, and up-cycling, whatever they could to make it work for them,” Bayvel said.
Their agent, Michael Steenhuis at Barry Plant Blackburn, said a pre-market open house promoted on the Pryors’ Instagram had more than 400 people through.
Master Builders Victoria data shows a 21.4 per cent increase in the number of loans taken out for renovations in Victoria in 2025, which chief executive Michaela Lihou said indicates strong demand for home improvement projects.
But she thought increased borrowing and material costs, as well as tougher lending requirements, would dampen investment this year.
“Many builders, particularly small to medium-sized businesses operating under fixed price contracts, are now confronting escalating costs they simply cannot absorb,” she said.
Unlike Grand Designs, which Bayvel said actively avoids featuring any product that a self-builder may have got through a brand deal, the Pryors are already working with construction brands to foreground products they use.
Other renovations programs feature supplier partnerships as part of the build.
But promotional supply deals and trades working around the clock is something that can give viewers of renovations content an unrealistic idea, Jason Charles of Charles Bros Building Contractors said.
“What they don’t understand is all the plaster’s donated, all the tap-ware’s donated, all the tiles are donated,” he said. “It’s pretty much just $20,000 in labour.”
Charles worked as a builder on The Block for two seasons, with a further two as an onscreen ambassador for HiPages, an online service that connects home owners with trades. The Block airs on Nine, owner of this masthead.
He thinks people need to be realistic about their own access and resources, and realise much of what they see on screen is done by professionals.
“You know, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing, certainly don’t tackle that on your own,” he said. “[Get] the right trades in for the right job.”
Greville Pabst, chair of WBP Group, was a buyer’s advocate and judge on The Block for 10 years, and agreed that renovations can often be bigger than owners might first imagine.
“It is a costly exercise and once you start, there’s often no turning back,” he said.
He said increasing building costs, supply chain issues with materials and rising interest rates were also making it more risky to renovate with the hope of a big profit.
“There was a time when you could do that, and you could make quite good money flipping houses, but I think that window has shut.”
