Property auction numbers tapered off across the country over the weekend as many Australians kept their Saturday focus on voting and sausage sizzles.
Data firm CoreLogic said there were 917 home auctions across all capital cities, down from an already low 1,218 in the prior week, and its early tally suggested about 57 per cent sold.
The analysis company’s preliminary figures for Sydney indicated 60.7 per cent of homes under the hammer in the city sold – although with only 168 of the 270 auctions counted, 38 per cent of results were missing.
“Sydney’s final clearance rate has come in at the high 50 per cent range for the last two weeks, as final collection comes in this week we will see if this was maintained for another week,” CoreLogic commented ahead of the finalised auction results expected on Thursday, adding that the last time Sydney’s clearance rate was in the high 50s was in mid-May last year.
The number of Sydney auctions – 270 – was a drop from 445 in the week before and 672 in the same week a year ago.
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Auction numbers in Melbourne dipped to 427 in the seven days to May 19 – from 546 in the prior week – and CoreLogic recorded a 62.9 per cent clearance rate based on the confirmed results of 329.
Westpac economist Matthew Hassan urged caution in analysing the clearance rates for the two big cities “due to high mark-downs between preliminary and final estimates in recent weeks”.
In Brisbane, CoreLogic counted a 38.6 per cent clearance rate based on the confirmed results of 44 auctions out of a total of 75 held across the city.
Only 25 per cent of auctions in Perth ended in a sale, according to confirmed data from 16 auctions in the city while the results for another 13 were not recorded.
Property values continued to slide across most capital cities during the week, with CoreLogic prices dropping 0.3 per cent in Sydney, 0.2 per cent in Melbourne, 0.1 per cent in both Perth and Adelaide while they remained flat in Brisbane.
