The Block host Scott Cam announced in Sunday’s premiere that the show is enforcing a strict new rule among this season’s contestants.

Scott Cam has implemented a strict new rule change for this year’s season of The Block – and it might make for a slightly less comfortable experience for contestants.

Usually, contestants would ‘rough it’ for the first few days of a season, living out of the tent as they built the first room of the house, typically a bedroom.

It meant that from the end of week one, they could pack up the tent and have a roof over their heads – and have the rest of the house to live in and use as it was built, week by week.

Scott Cam delivers the news.
But Cam told contestants this year that he was implementing a strict new rule: “No overnighters.” The five teams would not be able to spend the night inside their houses at all during the season.

Instead, they’ve been given luxury caravans to call home for the entire season. During Sunday’s premiere, all seemed in good spirits at the news they’d be sleeping in them for the next three months, during the testing conditions of a rural Victorian winter (with all that caravan living entails – including emptying of toilet waste).

The caravans are lush – but it’s a bit of a downgrade from previous seasons, living in the giant house you’re renovating.
This year’s contestants are a diverse bunch, among them two married Northern Territory police officers, a lesbian couple (who, in a slightly awkward first meeting, are initially mistaken for twins by their fellow contestants) a gay and straight best mate, and a champion pole dancer.

There is another big change expected this season: The Block’s mega-buyer, billionaire Adrian Portelli, should be nowhere to be seen come auction day.

In an extravagant move, Portelli bought all five Block houses at last season’s auctions – but later struggled to offload them.

He insisted the mega-buyout was to be his Block swan song and, as Cam confessed in a recent interview, the feeling was mutual.

“To be honest we said to Adrian ‘We’d love you not to come next year, if that’s all right,’” Cam revealed on Nova 96.9’s Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie last week.

Couple (not twins sisters, as some contestants assumed) Han and Cam.

Block megabuyer Adrian Portelli is expected to be absent come auction day. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling
“[Portelli] said, ‘Yeah, okay, he won’t come’, but he may come. We don’t know, but we do want to give mums and dads the opportunity to have a crack at a block house … but if Adrian comes and wants to buy the lot of them, well, that rules them out.”

Cam said he hoped to see “families have a bit of a crack this year,” after recent years have seen the show’s finales turn into bidding wars between Portelli and fellow mega-rich investor Danny Wallis.

But it seems Portelli’s not taking the soft-ban lying down: He’s switched allegiances to The Block’s competitor show on Seven, My Reno Rules.

Portelli’s rewards club company LMCT+ will be the major sponsor of the show’s new season, and he’s even donated two homes that will be flipped by contestants during the show.