More Houses Up For Auction

Results for week ending August 9

Last week saw a spike in auctions as sellers sought to cash in on Asian buyers who wanted to buy on the 8/8 (apparently 8 is a lucky number).

The Stat

Adelaide and Canberra both experience 80%+ clearance rates. While unusual, the volume of sales remains low compared to other markets.

The Graph

The Numbers

The Analysis

Although the clearance rates remained in the upper 70’s for Sydney and Melbourne, the increasing number of houses for sale – both over the previous week and the previous period last year – demonstrates increasing supply. Demand will need to pick up or else the negative absorption will begin to put downwards pressure on property prices.

What It Means For Investors

Once, when catching up with a pilot friend of mine over lunch on a still and mainly sunny day, he said ‘it’s going to be windy tomorrow’.

‘Huh’, I replied. ‘How can you tell?’

‘That wispy high level cloud is being pushed by an approaching front. The wind is moving fast up there in the atmosphere, and it almost always means it will be windy tomorrow.’

Impressed by my prophetic friend’s confidence, I eagerly awoke the next morning to…. wind!

Looking up in the property sky everything still seems sunny. But if you look closely, there is some high level wispy clouds that have me wondering whether tomorrow we might wake up to windy investing conditions. Best to prepare, just in case.

By Steve McKnight

Steve McKnight, the founder of PropertyInvesting.com, is a respected property investing authority as well as Australia's #1 best-selling business author.