Around half of all homes up for auction across Australia’s capital cities sold during the first quarter of 2019, according to CoreLogic's Quarterly Auction Market Review.
A quarterly increase in the auction clearance rates across Australia's capital cities still has the market well behind where it was at the same time last year, according to the latest data from CoreLogic.
The company's Quarterly Auction Market Review shows a clearance rate of 49.9 per cent across the combined capitals, representing an increase of 6.6 percentage points on the December quarter results.
While clearance rates for the March quarter are on the up, they pale in comparison to the same quarter last year, when 64.6 per cent of properties across the combined capitals sold at auction.
At a glance:
CoreLogic Head of Research Cameron Kusher told WILLIAMS MEDIA the figures should be read in the context of how the market performs historically.
"You typically find as auction volumes climb over the final quarter each year clearance rates slip," he said.
"The first quarter will typically see lower volumes and an increase in clearance rates.
"The better comparison is to what happened over the March 2018 quarter and you can see that over the most recent quarter auction volumes are significantly lower as are clearance rates which is reflective of the broader market conditions."
Source: CoreLogic
According to CoreLogic, auction clearance rates over the March 2019 quarter were 14.7 percentage points lower than they were over the March 2018 quarter.
Across the combined capitals, 14,647 residential auctions were scheduled in the March 2019 quarter, compared to 25,894 in the December 2018 quarter and 20,701 over the March quarter a year ago.
Mr Kusher said vendors were less confident of achieving a positive result at auction, and this "had further impacted auction volumes during what is traditionally a quiet start to the year.”
Sydney posted the largest improvement in auction clearance rates relative to the December quarter last year
The CoreLogic Quarterly Auction Market Review found that quarterly clearance rates increased across all capital cities except for Hobart (-5.2 percentage points) and Canberra (-1.6 percentage points).
Canberra reported the most significant drop year on year, with clearance rates falling by -22.6 percentage points to 45.6 per cent in the March 2019 quarter.
Sydney vendors achieved the highest quarterly clearance rates with 53.2 per cent of the 5,278 properties for auction selling in the three months to March. This represented a 10.1 percentage point increase relative to the December quarter, but -10.4 percentage points lower than 12 months ago.
Melbourne remained Australia’s busiest capital city market over the March quarter, with 6,375 auctions scheduled (51.8 per cent clearance rate), down from 12,372 in the last quarter and 9,488 a year ago.
Tasmania had the fewest auctions scheduled with 45 properties for sale, however, it was the only capital city to report an increase in auction volumes over the past quarter.
Source: CoreLogic
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