Daylight savings provides mid week property auction opportunity during festival of super Saturdays

With many top estate agents, and auctioneers already overloaded with listings, prospective spring auction vendors face the likely choice of a weekday onsite or an in-room auction.

Daylight savings has become a welcome opportunity for Sydney home sellers hard pressed to secure a Saturday auction timeslot.

These bumper schedules of 900 plus auction weekends means many last minute desirious spring sellers are turning to weeknight on-site auctions.

"We're seeing a trend of vendors and agents utilising daylight savings for on-site auctions mid-week avoiding busy Saturdays," auctioneer Rocky Bartolotto said.

"We have more on-site auctions booked in the coming weeks taking place on Monday through to Thursday's nights," he said. 

These weekday twilight auctions are potentially just as powerful in outcome as any onsite weekend.

I hold the strong belief that the competitive nature of a well marketed auction property campaign can create outcomes where buyers bid higher than they originally wanted to spend.

Of course there's always large crowds of neighbourhood stickybeaks at any on-site auction that create the impression of perhaps greater buyer interest in the property than actually the case.

Mid-morning in-rooms were once the norm for most Sydney residential auctions, with the innovative late estate agent Andrew Gibbons popularizing the weekend onsite in the mid-1980s. Before then private treaty ruled.

All sales techniques have advantages and disadvantages, but I think the Real Estate Institute of Australia President Peter Bushby was misguided when he suggested last year "the actual (on-site or in-room) location honestly doesn’t make any difference to the end result.”

I reckon on-site auctions can potentially, with a great auctioneer, create a completely different dynamic to any in-rooms.

There is a definite heightened emotional factor possible when the registered bidders are actually at the home... and especially when potentially about to lose out. The auctioneer and everyone present are focused solely on the one property, with all the time to have the property sold then and there. 

While families typically turn out at onsite auctions which heightened the emotional factors at play. 

Of course some property offerings don't lend themselves to onsite auctions, and some vendors aren't in any particular rush to sell.

The weather, noise and traffic and parking can also play havoc with onsite auctions. 

Inrooms have their pluses and minuses.

But auction lists for in-room auctions can sometimes run as high as 30 or more offerings, and the crowd can often be noisily disinterested until their one comes up.

Normally the strongest sale prospects head the list. The room then thins out so that by evening's end there's more estate agents hovering than prospective buyers which casts a pall over proceedings.

It is sometimes the case that these tail-end listings weren't ever suited to the auction system and ought have been actually offered via the private treaty system.

CoreLogic RP Data tabulated that Sydney's strongest performing regions for clearance rates over the past three months were those concentrated closest the city centre, that is auction heartland. Mosman was the busiest and Bondi Junction the best.

Cameron Kusher from CoreLogic RP Data noted the top selling region was the eastern suburbs (84.8% sales success under the hammer), then the inner west (84.0%), followed by North Sydney and Hornsby (81.7%).

The city and Inner South (81.3%) and Sutherland (80%) all recorded a clearance rate at or above the 80% mark for the quarter.

North Sydney and Hornsby (1,779) and the inner south west (1,700) were the busiest sub-regions for auctions.

This article was first published in the Saturday Daily Telegraph.