As a deeply spiritual city, the Easter Weekend in Sydney is usually a slow time for auctions.

Most locals spend this special time of the shopping year with their families performing the sacred rituals of the fructose enriched egg hunt and undertaking pilgrimages to the purpose built shrine for the agricultural gods at Homebush.

Fortunately, as a rapidly evolving and culturally diverse city some still found time to burn a few joss sticks for our real estate gods (the one true faith) and there was some activity around the postcodes by our priestly auctioneer caste – ably assisted by their deacons in the suburban franchised agencies.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Property Monitors report records that agents reported just 68% of the measly 56 auctions listed for Saturday – which suggests that a few fax machines may have become clogged with shiny foil and molten chocolate and thus results were not forthcoming.   Tip for young players – don’t operate office equipment after scoffing the left over ‘complimentary’ eggs you were handing out to the “full pension” investors and wide-eyed SMSF mob during the day.

Note:   In order to encourage agents to help APM collate the most complete stats each Saturday night, the Glass Pyramid is presenting all results as a percentage of the number of Auctions Listed.  The reason for this is that agents are more likely to report ‘good results’ sooner and that can tilt the figures when results are presented as a % of what agents have bothered to report on Saturday afternoon.

Anyhow – onto the good stuff!

There are two tables this week.  The first contains yesterday’s APM slender but perfectly formed results pdf slices and diced.  The second contains a summary of the last 12 weeks.

A few comments on yesterday:

• As in 2013 Easter was early this year.  As a result the comparison weekends for 2014 and 2015 do not provide a useful comparison.
• Having said that, the median of $1,160,000 was consistent with the results so far this year, so there was no cheap compound chocolate eggs to be found this Easter.
• Plus the clearance rate of 48% (of Auctions listed) was only just shy of the “magic” 50% mark.
• Thus while only a few tea leaves in the tea cup this week – they do not foretell an imminent end to the “bull” summer.
• Pre-Action Panic – jumped to 32% of listed auctions – which suggests that more than a few vendors were keen to get a sale in the show bag and not wait and see if their eggs would maintain their shape under the hot spotlight of an auction.
• Hammer Time – slipped to 25% with only 14 of the 56 listed auctions receiving a blessing from the auction high priests.
• Seller Sadness – almost vanished with only 4% of listed auctions left in the egg basket by the end of Saturday.

Table 1 – Saturday 26 March 2016

Table 2 – Summary of recent results.