[booboo]

muzza, on 16 February 2011 - 11:52 AM, said:

Good on you DataDawg, love your work man.

Same here. Find your graphs really interesting.

[DataDawg]

muzza, on 16 February 2011 - 09:52 PM, said:

Good on you DataDawg, love your work man.

booboo, on 16 February 2011 - 11:27 PM, said:

Same here. Find your graphs really interesting.

It's an absolute pleasure to assemble and show the bigger picture, even if we don't know how much each data point is massaged/tweaked before being released. The more info we have, the easier it is to judge what is reliable and to what degree it is reliable.

This post has been edited by DataDawg: 17 February 2011 - 06:24 AM

[booboo]

63% for Sydney 19th Feb, according to APM on homepriceguide:

Quote

Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 267
Sold: 193
Withdrawn: 37
% Cleared: 63%
Total Sales: $159,771,200
Median: $802,000

The auction I was interested in wasn't listed. From what I can gather, it didn't sell, so no surprise there.

[booboo]

Few updates.

For the week ending 20th February, Sydney auction clearance rates were 58.2%, according to RP Data on realestate.com.au.

For Saturday 26th, APM had the following:

Quote

Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 427
Sold: 306
Withdrawn: 44
% Cleared: 65%
Total Sales: $271,323,000
Median: $815,000

Big improvement on last weekend, comparing the total volume and sales amount, and a small uplift in median.

This Fairfax article has the Sydney clearance rate at 62%, though. A few extra results have been added, most of which must've failed. The Inner West finally appears to be faltering a little as well.

Quote

SYDNEY'S inner-west auction clearance rate slipped to 66 per cent at the weekend's auctions, down from its month-to-date tally of 71 per cent.

With a $630,000 median price, Canterbury Bankstown was the best-performing region, with a 72 per cent success rate from its 29 listings.

The weakest district with a 44 per cent clearance rate from 57 listings was the lower north shore, according to Australian Property Monitors.

Agents said Sydney's higher-than-average supply levels had allowed buyers to become choosier, and vendors were often required to adjust their price expectations.

There was an $842,000 median price in the inner west, and the highest sale from 90 results was in Drummoyne. Listed with hopes of $1.75 million plus, the renovated 1920s single-storey house fetched $1.78 million before auction.

Agents sold 74 properties before auction, including a Surry Hills Georgian manor which fetched a record $3.1 million.

Sydney recorded a 62 per cent success rate based on 508 results.

Paddington was among the busiest suburbs with agents selling 10 of the 14 terraces.

Sydney clearance rates have sat above 60 per cent for the past three Saturdays after the weak 46 per cent opening weekend.

''The sentiment is fairly positive, and below $1 million is really strong,'' the McGrath auctioneer, Scott Kennedy-Green, said.

Ignoring the token positive sentiment line from the token REA, I guess that sellers are starting to meet the market. Would be curious to see the median auction prices from April to November 2010 as a comparison.

Of course, in another article on RP Data's latest release, Chris Zappone appears to lazily use the unrevised figure. Zappone has a habit of ignoring revised numbers, it seems.

Quote

Sydney's clearance rate was 65 per cent last weekend, up from 60.3 per cent the week before, according to Fairfax-owned Australian Property Monitors. In Melbourne, however, the clearance rate slowed to 65.2 per cent last weekend, from 70.1 per cent the previous week.

edit: Oh boy, Zappone is sloppy in his numbers sometimes. He cited the first article I linked, which has a 62% rate for Sydney, as the source the 65% Sydney rate.

This post has been edited by booboo: 28 February 2011 - 12:41 AM

[booboo]

Sigh. No wonder no-one knows the real state of the market. In this article on Domain Dr Andrew Wilson gives a nice little spruik, and has a third figure for Sydney clearance rates from APM: 61%.

My favourite bit is how he cherry picks dates to the end of 2010 to make it look like the market is in great shape. I love the "recently" word used too, when RP Data has shown homes to be flat since around May 2010.

But being now in 2011, one has to ask, what is the relevance of this article on 2009? Other than a good spruik, of course!

Quote

Sydney property prices took off in 2009 after a long period of subdued growth.

According to the latest data from Australian Property Monitors, Sydney’s median house price rose by more than 20 per cent between March 2009 and December 2010.

Sydney apartment prices have also experienced strong growth recently, with the median rising by almost 20 per cent between September 2008 and December 2010.


The most popular suburb in Sydney for house sales last year was Blacktown with 619 sales reported. Blacktown also recorded a relatively modest December quarter 2010 median house price of $355,000, indicating its likely popularity with first-home buyers.

[booboo]

https://lh6.googleus.../s1600/auc2.bmp

Another day, another set of auction results.

According to that, there's 342 auctions with an unknown result in Sydney. I wonder how that compares to the number of unknown results last year? I'll try to dig up some older similar RP Data auction results...

[booboo]

Found one:

http://3.bp.blogspot...uw/s1600/cl.bmp

That has around 10% unreported, or 53 of 544. 342 of 882 is close to 40%.

[sydney3000]

The auction results must have been bad. The PDF files on domain.com.au haven't been updated yet.

[booboo]

Yup, checked on Saturday night and saw they weren't there and wondered if the resutls weren't too hot, or if it's a one off. Then saw that article in the Smellygraph on Sunday and got really suspicious.

Anyway, RP Data results on realestate.com.au say 60.2% clearance rate for the week ending 27th February.

I suspect the clearance rate may be a bit lower from last weekend, but we'll wait and see. I am expecting the APM results to be up sometime today.

[booboo]

APM results are out, and they are not particularly strong. Well, selective reporting of results continues, by the looks. Total properties reported well down, clearance rate has fallen 10%, yet median has sky rocketed from $826k to $866k. Total sales also a bit down as well.

Quote

Property Snapshot
Median: $866,250
% Cleared: 56%
Total Sales: $225,822,800
Withdrawn: 48
Total Properties: 345
Sold: 221

Will be interesting to see if we resume the pattern of falling clearance rates from the end of last year. If reported clearance rates in Sydney fall to 50%, it will show the market is not in good health at all, or that is not showing signs of a "recovery", as spruiked by APM bull and talking head Dr Andrew Wilson.

[booboo]

Christopher Joye has posted initial clearance rates for last week in the following picture on his blog:

https://lh3.googleus...8/s1600/auc.bmp

That has Sydney at 57.1%, with 177 auction results still unknown out of a total of 629 (the unknown still being a very very significant amount, and more than what RP Data usually has). On Friday sometime further revised RP Data numbers should pop up on realestate.com.au...

[Bernard L. Madoff]

Sayce:

Why Property Investing is for Mugs

Quote

Adam: “How much further do you think the property market could come off? We have recently sold our property in Willoughby and we’ve taken over a 10% hit on our property… we had it valued last February and we recently sold it, in fact it’s over, a greater than 10% hit, and in some of the surrounding suburbs people are seeing in excess of 20-30% devaluations on their properties. That probably hasn’t escaped to the press yet but it is significant, and in talking to a lot of… the real estate agents, they’ve only really got one buyer on most of these properties. So I’m just wondering whether you have any view in terms of how far it could fall?”

Before we go on, we like Adam’s reference to reports of price falls not having “escaped to the press yet.” Of course he should have said it “hasn’t escaped from the press yet.”

The press is just as keen as the property spruikers to keep price falls under wraps. Even when they do run a prices-falling story, it’s soon followed by a prices-to-the-moon story – just to even things up. But anyway, back to the show…

Host: “I don’t see any evidence of significant falls in the lower north shore of Sydney, what are your thoughts?”

Expert 1: “No, I do a lot of work in the lower north shore, a lot of work. And in fact I had business in Willoughby and I was auctioning a couple of properties in Willoughby on… Saturday, and we didn’t sell one of them I grant you, but I have not personally seen a drop in the lower north shore.

[sydney3000]

It feels like a Monty Python skit.

[urchin]

sydney3000, on 08 March 2011 - 05:36 AM, said:

It feels like a Monty Python skit.

would you like a parrot with that?

[booboo]

Quote

Saturday 12th March 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 291
Sold: 208
Withdrawn: 41
% Cleared: 63%
Total Sales: $214,369,000
Median: $850,000

Total properties reported is pretty low again, but the clearance rate stumbled back into the low sixties.

Still waiting on realestate.com.au to update the results for last week's auctions from RP Data. The figures from that must be close to the high fourties.

[booboo]

BTW, I caught some of a property focused "Your Money Your Call", where they spent most of it having a good old spruikfest and not even bothering to take callers. It was hosted by the guy (dont know/don't care about his name) who in another episode said, to paraphrase, "interest rates don't matter, but how much you can borrow does - if you can borrow more at higher rates, always borrow as much as you can to invest in property". Today he had a pearler where he claimed the best property investment ever made was "any property you buy". And of course, any time is the best time to buy.

One of the "experts" was the guy from Century 21. He just had so many mixed messages - said there was a "correction", but a correction doesn't necessarily mean that prices are falling. Then he later admitted prices were falling. Then he later claimed the correction meant that prices weren't rising as fast. Then he said that some minor discounting was taking place, in the form of "4 to 6%". Then he claimed it was better we weren't in a "boom", because booms made him nervous and the best market is a stable one. Then he said a lot of other verbal diorrhea.

I changed TV channels before they got to the bit where they worked out if amongst themselves if it was a buyers market or sellers market.

[booboo]

realestate.com.au auction results page with RP Data auction results STILL not updated from the week ending 5th March, and Chris Joye didn't post last weeks RP Data auction results on his blog. I'm guessing the results definitely were not good.

No doubt we'll see them updated in the next few days for the week ending the 12th March, as the results were a bit stronger.

[sydney3000]

What we need today is a clearance rate of less than 40% in Sydney. This should hit the papers on Monday and the discussion should carry over to Saturday's election. The uproar should make it possible to reduce Labor seats to less than ten in NSW and it could lead to a possible permanent destruction of the party.

This post has been edited by sydney3000: 19 March 2011 - 12:07 AM

[DataDawg]

Some historical context for clearance rate believers and doubters alike (the latest data from all sources is shown):





All three sources show that the downward trend in clearance rates is still very much intact.

[booboo]

Thanks to Trips in the Melbourne clearance rate thread, RP Data has the week ending 6th March at 53.4% (579 reported), although that's a mid-week revision. I wonder if they have further end of week ones not published?

According to realestate.com.au, RP Data has the week ending 13th March at 53.3% (490 reported).

These values are 3 and 10 percentage points lower than APM results published on the Saturday night! I am guessing that an end of week revision for the 6th March week would've seen RP Data results much lower, which is why realestate.com.au never updated the results for that week on their site.

As for APM last weekend:

Quote

Saturday 19th March 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 361
Sold: 255
Withdrawn: 49
% Cleared: 62%
Total Sales: $208,647,500
Median: $785,000

Reported auctions is up from the last two weekends, but median and total sales $ well down.