Damp weather doesn’t dampen auction results in Melbourne and Sydney
The weekend's damp weather didn't dampen auction results.
Bidders were in attendance in both major capital cities, and auction results gave further signs of entering something of a holding pattern.
The Real Estate Institute of Victoria put Melbourne’s clearance rate at 62% over the weekend from its 797 auctions.
The last week of February showed Melbourne's clearance rate at 61%, among the most successful auction weekends since October 2010 and the first weekend with a clearance rate higher than 60% since March last year.
Sydney recorded a 55% clearance rate from its initial 311 results, according to Australian Property Monitors. It was 55% in the weekend prior.
Australian Property Monitors data shows 19.7% of Sydney vendors chose auctions over private treaty last year, compared with 21.7% in 2010.The percentage of homes actually sold by auction fell to 13.9% of total sales from a peak of 15.8% in the same period in 2010.
Senior economist at APM Dr Andrew Wilson says after a flat few years, there was strong auction activity in the second half of 2010.
The inner west and east are Sydney's traditional auction hot spots, with 26% of vendors selling this way last year.
The inner west had peaked a year earlier at 28%, with east on 27%.
Tim Lawless, research director at RP Data, noted recently that auction clearance rates were one of the timeliest indicators of housing market sentiment, particularly in the major auction markets of Melbourne and Sydney.
About 30% of all Melbourne houses and units are taken to auction (as opposed to private treaty sales) – the highest proportion of any capital city.
