Twilight auctions seize the day

Vendors are booking weekday twilight auctions which exploit daylight saving starting next weekend.

This provides an alternative to listing among 1000 or more others on super Saturdays before the Melbourne Cup long weekend, the Christmas break and Easter 2015.

“Twilight auctions are convenient, comfortable and just as powerful,” says Marshall White director John Bongiorno.

“The neighbourhood still turns out to check the property’s value and bidders compete to secure the home they saw advertised,” he said.

A twilight auction held by Marshall White at 10 Byrne Avenue, Elwood, in early April this year set a new record for the suburb at the time.

On Saturday listings plummeted. Some of those were sold before auction.

Nigel Raymond, of Stockdale & Leggo, sold a single-storey two-bedroom villa unit at 6/101 McCrae Street, Dandenong, on Friday at the reserve of $250,000, because the buyers refused to bid on Saturday, saying “you never know [what might happen] on Grand Final day”.

But Dennis Dellas, of First National Lindellas, ran an auction ” the same as I do every year  at 11am”.

He offered a three-bedroom house at 547 Mitcham Road, Vermont and it attracted five bidders.

He put it on the market at $630,000, sold to first-home buyers from Brunswick for $655,000, then he went to the big game.

In Ivanhoe East, scarcity won the day

“A great many standard house blocks here have a single dwelling covenant,” says James Davis, of Miles Real Estate.

So the two-bedroom house at 2/26 Burton Crescent, one of two on a block, drew two bidders, went on the market at $680,000 and sold to a young couple for $710,000.