[booboo]

Thanks for the graphs DataDawg. There definitely appears to be a weakening trend there, but we will need another few weeks of data for confirmation. But your graphs certainly put paid to the BS sprouted by Dr Andrew Wilson in a recent article, where he claimed that Sydney house prices will rise in the second half of the year because Sydney auction clearance rates are currently rising.

[booboo]

An anecdote, and images of the last few RP Data clearance rates from here and here.

First, the anecdote. A friend saw an auction was about to be held last Saturday in the set of townhouses where he lives, and decided to attend. The townhouses are all dual level 2 bed 2 bath affairs. The REA informed of a price guide of $525,000+ on arrival. And so the "action" started - there were just two sets of bidders, both being low to mid twenties (FHBs by appearance). After taking an initial bid at mid-4s, the two sets of bidders went up to $500,000 before the auctioneer could not get any more blood from the stone(s). After going in and conferring with the vendor, the auctioneer came out and placed a vendor bid for...wait for it...$540,000. Makes sense with the price guide, right? Sure enough, the place was passed in (and does indeed appear in the APM list of auctions released for the weekend). So after checking the listing on Domain, it appears the agent had updated the listing to be private treaty, but guess what the asking price was? A cool $585,000. Talk about meeting the market - good luck with that.

And the images (apologies for an cross posting with the Melbourne thread):

[Solomon]

I know this is Sydney auction results, but...
Is that data correct for Brisbane and Perth?
16% & 15% clearance rates!!!

[tom]

Solomon, on 21 March 2011 - 11:17 PM, said:

I know this is Sydney auction results, but...
Is that data correct for Brisbane and Perth?
16% & 15% clearance rates!!!

While it sounds tragic at best they get up to around 30%.

I don't even know why people bother with auctions in either place? I suspect it is bank sales just ensuring fairness or some other quirk, because surely any individual acting for their own best interests would not waste their coin on the idea?

[zaph]

tom, on 21 March 2011 - 11:32 PM, said:

While it sounds tragic at best they get up to around 30%.

I don't even know why people bother with auctions in either place? I suspect it is bank sales just ensuring fairness or some other quirk, because surely any individual acting for their own best interests would not waste their coin on the idea?

i've been to around a dozen auctions in brisbane. 2 were bank repos and one was marketed as no reserve - they were the only ones that sold. and they sold for what i considered to be slightly above market. it seems that in the frenzy to get a bargain people pay more.

[booboo]

Results from RP Data for week ending March 20 are available here. Sydney is 52.7%, clearing continuing the rising trend, as intimated by Dr Andrew Wilson, by falling .6 percentage points. Last 5 weeks starting from Feb 20th: 58.2%, 60.2%, 53.4%, 53.3%, 52.7%.

Image below. I am beginning to think it should be copied to ImageShack or something so RP Data don't know we are linking to them? Anyway:



Enjoy (or not).

[booboo]

Another note: once again, RP Data clearance rates for the week are nearly a full 10 percentage points lower than APM's reported clearance rate on Saturday. Go APM! Wonder if Black_Dragon would have much to say on this?

[booboo]

Results from APM on Saturday...

Quote

Saturday 26th March 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 237
Sold: 159
Withdrawn: 24
% Cleared: 61%
Total Sales: $129,394,000
Median: $770,500

Reporting numbers fell much lower this week, despite supposedly larger amounts of auctions coming along. Median is also trending down a bit.

The current different between RP Data's auction results (released Thursday) and APM's Saturday auction results sits around 10 percentage points, so the real Sydney clearance rate is more around 50% (or more likely, lower).

Good to also see Dr Andrew Wilson's trend of rising clearance rate continuing.

[tom]

Who would have thought that RP data would end up being the organisation which publishes the more accurate figures.

[booboo]

tom; indeed. RP Data actually seem to be rather bearish currently, more bearish than their partner Rismark anyway.

Here's RP Data's clearance rates for the week, and note how it is indeed a whole 10 percentage points lower than APM at 51.5% (to APM's 61%). The good Dr Andrew Wilson will somehow find a way to show clearance rates rising, however.

Funny how Chris Joye hasn't had a congratulatory blog post on rising clearance rates for a month now.




At the moment I fail to see where the 1.7% bounce in raw Sydney house prices came from in February. I expect this to be revised down, followed by a flat to slightly negative March in the next RP Data/Rismark home index release.

[booboo]

Reported properties well up this week, as the clearance rate falls to 57%, showing that Dr Andrew Wilson's rising trend of clearance rates is continuing.

The median, however, has a $60k bounce.

Quote

Sydney Auction Results
Saturday 2nd April 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 398
Sold: 255
Withdrawn: 52
% Cleared: 57%
Total Sales: $233,521,600
Median: $845,500

[booboo]

And to question the veracity of results reported by REAs, we have this property:

Quote

Alexandria P203/11-15 Power St 3 br u $841,000 S McGrath EA Edgecliff

Now, look at this apartment in Domain.

Now unless I am missing something obvious, I am calling bullsh*t on that supposed auction result. Could it possibly be either REAs or APM actively fudging the results? Or could it be a typo in APM's results? The suspicious value, though, is the price, which is about $200k higher than it should be for that apartment.

[cobran20]

This should do wonders for the auction results!

Home loans extend drop on weak demand

Quote

Home loans dropped for a second consecutive month in February with New South Wales posting its biggest monthly decline in 14 years. The share of first-home buyers shrank further.

The number of home loans fell 5.6 per cent to 45,393 in February, following a revised 6.3 per cent fall in January, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Economists polled by Bloomberg tipped a 2 per cent fall.

Home loans in New South Wales plummeted 10.1 per cent in seasonally adjusted terms, the most since February 1997, the ABS reported.

[gospeljohn]

cobran20, on 06 April 2011 - 02:54 AM, said:

This should do wonders for the auction results!

Home loans extend drop on weak demand

Starting to look like the other states are fast catching up with WA and QLD. . .

[booboo]

edit: RP Data auction results are available here.

RP Data auction results for week ending 3rd April sees the Sydney clearance rate steady in the low 50s - the declining trend taking a breather, for now, by the looks. I suspect that APM clearance rates will trend more towards RP Data's now, in preparation for cries for housing stimulus from APM.

For those following Melbourne, clearance rates there seem to be settling into the high 50s.



Meanwhile, it's boom time for NT with 100% clearance rate! A massive 3/3 houses being sold, no doubt indicating that house prices in NT are heading to the mooooon...just don't include those two unreported ones!

This post has been edited by booboo: 07 April 2011 - 04:42 AM

[booboo]

Cobran20 already posted a link to this in the Sydney thread, but to collate in one spot, here is the highlights (lowlights?). As he said, it's not healthy.

Total properties is up a little, but so were total numbers. Median and total sales were also slightly lower on higher numbers.

Is Sydney heading back to clearance rates less than 50%? The RP Data auction clearance rates released on Thursday / Friday will be most interesting.

Quote

Sydney Auction Results
Saturday 9th April 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 410
Sold: 246
Withdrawn: 58
% Cleared: 53%
Total Sales: $214,288,400
Median: $810,000

[booboo]

Here's RP Data's results for the week ending 10th April. Sydney at 50.2% - nearly under the magic 50%.

[The Claw]

Quote

Sydney Auction Results
Saturday 9th April 2011
Median: $810,000

Ouch. Not Cheap. I don't think I will celebrate just yet.

[booboo]

From the last weekend Saturday 16th. A huge 3 percentage points bounce! The recovery is here! We'll see if the RP Data results have seen similar movement at the end of the week,

The median has fallen, interestingly. Total properties is slightly up.

Quote

Sydney Auction Results
Saturday 16th April 2011
Property Snapshot
Total Properties: 457
Sold: 291
Withdrawn: 70
% Cleared: 55%
Total Sales: $230,279,700
Median: $769,500

[booboo]

There were no results reported from the Easter long weekend (due to hardly any auctions I guess), but there's the RP Data results from the previous weekend. The Sydney results show a small rebound of 2 - 3 percentage points from the recent trend, but the number of unreported auctions is creeping up. Interestingly, the RP Data Sydney result is just 1 percentage lower than the APM result.