Melbourne gets its super Saturday test after all
Stand by for November 26 as Melbourne get its super Saturday 1,000-plus auction weekend this spring after all.
It looked like vendors had been frightened off by the low 50% auction clearance rates and bearish headlines, and as a result that the benchmark would go wanting in 2011.
Melbourne typically can have five or so 1,000-plus auction weekends each year, but November 26 will be the first this year. There were some 950-auction weekends during late autumn.
There are 1,045 auctions scheduled for the last weekend of the month, according to Robert Larocca at the Real Estate Institute of Victoria.
It’s well short of Melbourne's biggest auction day, with a record 1,400 properties, which was in March 2008.
Sydney will have a 630-plus weekend on the last Saturday of November, according to Clinton McNabb at Australian Property Monitors.
There will be fewer auctions that weekend than Sydney's record 779 weekend in November 2010, the biggest auction day in the state's history.
In the meantime Sydney’s weekend clearance rate was 57% this past weekend, which was the highest for two months.
Melbourne’s clearance rate on the weekend was 54% compared with 50% on each of the past two weekends.
Next weekend the REIV expects about 815 auctions in Melbourne and APM expects 530 in Sydney.
Melbourne’s last 1,000-plus flurry was the December 12 weekend last year, with 1,235 auctions and a clearance rate of 57%.
