The real estate market is all about opportunity
The real estate market is all about opportunity: opportunity to buy, and opportunity to sell.
This past Saturday, Jim Malo wrote in Domain that the vendors of a particular property in Elsternwick gave themselves the best chance of selling, by going to auction on a Sunday.
Sunday auctions have been common in Melbourne’s south-east for many years, in order to cater for the city’s Jewish community, who prefer to avoid auctions held on the Sabbath.
I don’t see any reason that we shouldn’t hold Sunday or weeknight auctions more widely.
One of the issues many bidders have is their inability to be in two places at once on a Saturday, when two properties they are interested in are going to auction at the same time.
In my view this opens up two opportunities:
Residential auctions can and should be held on days of the week other than Saturdays
The industry must begin to more widely employ online bidding
Recently The Auction Company has conducted a series of auctions on Sundays, particularly in places like the Mornington Peninsula. These have been well attended and have sold well.
However, in yet another bizarre quirk of the Victorian property market, Victoria remains one of the only major markets in Australia that doesn’t hold residential auctions on weeknights.
In New South Wales in particular, weeknight residential portfolio auctions have been held for many years with great success, yet for some reason we continue to resist the trend in Victoria.
If you’re a residential agent, I’d love to know your thoughts on why this is the case.
I don’t see any reason why the Victorian industry couldn’t follow the New South Wales example.
In my view it would open up greater selling opportunity, by giving more prospective buyers greater opportunity to attend a higher number of auctions, therefore increasing the competition for properties, and increasing the likelihood of a property selling.
Of course, if the Victorian industry largely continues to refuse to give buyers the greatest opportunity to bid by diversifying the days of the week that we conduct auctions, then surely we must be more open to new technologies that allow online bidding.
After all, the more opportunity we give bidders to buy, the more opportunity we give our vendors to sell.
