Preliminary auction results this week show a clearance rate of 58.1% across 1,210 auctions.
Compared to last year, volumes continue to trend lower each week, with almost double the volume of homes taken to auction over the same week in 2018 (2,279), when 58.2% sold.
Last week, though, 1,479 auctions were held, and the final clearance rate rose to 52.5% —the second highest clearance rate seen over the year-to-date.
The clearance rate is expected to adjust lower on the full set of results, but the final figures over the past two months have been reaching around the low-to-mid 50% range, and this is likely to happen again this week.
"While the trend in auction clearance rates certainly aren’t describing strong market conditions, with the success rate holding around ten percentage points higher than late last year, it reflects a better fit between buyer and seller expectations on prices," CoreLogic said.
Melbourne, Australia’s largest auction market, recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 56.8% across 545 auctions this week—up slightly from the 56.6% final clearance rate last week when 672 homes were auctioned.
In 2018, the city posted a clearance rate of 77.5% across 1,099 auctions.
There were 441 auctions held in Sydney returning a preliminary auction clearance rate of 65.6%—the strongest preliminary result across the capital cities.
The current results are higher than the clearance rate of 57.2% across 539 auctions last week, and 57.5% across 787 auctions one year ago.
Across the smaller auction markets, preliminary results show that Perth was the best-performing in terms of clearance rate with 53.8% of auctions successful. However, there were only 18 auctions held across the city.
Brisbane, on the other hand, was the worst-performing auction market this week with 83 homes auctioned and 39.2% clearance rate.
