Auction Results and Monday Morning

On Monday morning, the newspapers often have an article about the health of the property market, based on the weekend's auction results report by APM. This is often misleading, for the following reasons:

• The APM results that are the basis for the report are often incomplete, as a number of auction results have not yet been reported.
• Brisbane has far fewer auction sales than Melbourne and Sydney - so the report does not take into account sales other than by auction which is the bulk of the sales in Brisbane
• The APM results focus on Saturday auctions, and do not capture auctions during the week. Ray White, for example, often has Friday morning auctions.
• The report, for the most part, relies on agents reporting to APM. If the agent has a bad result, there is less incentive to report.

Read Chris Joye here on this topic. This article makes a similar comment.