Pre-Grand Final auction surge offers Sydney buyers some relief

Sydney’s supercharged weekend auction market will host its usual surge in listings this Saturday as sellers avoid a clash for buyer attention with the following weekend’s AFL Grand Final.

More than 700 homes are scheduled to go under the hammer this Saturday, a big jump from the 567 listed last weekend. Although numbers will be significantly higher and offer buyers more choice, they remain well below the 984 auctioned over the same weekend last year.

Sydney buyers will be presented with the second highest offering this year, behind only the 911 auctioned over the pre-Easter weekend in March.

The upper north shore is the most popular region in Sydney this weekend for auctions, with 112 listed, followed by the inner west, 106, the south, 95, the city and east, 81, the lower north, 72, the south-west, 60, the northern beaches, 50, the west, 49, Canterbury Bankstown, 44, the north-west, 34 and the central coast, 12.  

Mosman is the most popular suburb in Sydney for auctions this weekend with 11, followed by Marsfield, Randwick and Eastwood each with eight and Chatswood, Ryde, Ashfield, Alexandria, Rosebery and Redfern that will each host seven auctions.

The Sydney home auction market has bounced back hard by recording its highest clearing rate last Saturday since June last year, at the height of the then record boom in house price growth.

Sydney recorded a stunning clearance rate of 85.1 per cent, well ahead of the previous weekend’s surprisingly lower result of 77.1 per cent and remarkably nearly 15 per cent higher than the 71.3 per cent recorded over the same weekend last year.

Sydney has now recorded five weekends out of the past six with clearance rates at or above 80 per cent, with the early spring market a bonanza for sellers. This is in sharp contrast to last spring, when rates fell backwards steeply to well below 70 per cent as the market was dampened by higher mortgage rates.

Sydney’s regions produced some extraordinary results last weekend, with three areas recording clearance rates above 90 per cent.

A resurgence in house price growth is sure to follow  the booming result for the Sydney weekend home auction market. Although growth rates are unlikely to match last year’s record levels, they will nonetheless prove more of a headache for local first-home buyers struggling to get into the market. 

First-home buyer loans in New South Wales have fallen by 4.6 per cent over the first seven months of this year compared with the same period a year ago, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows. It now takes an estimated five years’ worth of savings from average incomes to get into the market.

Dr Andrew Wilson is Domain Group’s chief economist

Twitter @DocAndrewWilson