CONCRETE DETAIL
by Christopher Joye
Posted 17 Sep 2009 11:04 AM
Fairfax: get your auction stats right!
Fairfax is well served by many outstanding property journos – the wise old sage, Robert Harley, the millionaire maven, Jonathon Chancellor, silent assassins Ben Wilmot and Michelle Singer, young Turks like Lisa Carapiet and Shanon Nicholls, and my personal favourite – the budding “econogirl”, Jessica Irvine.
While these folks are generally excellent at discriminating between good and bad statistics, somebody needs to have a chat to them about their auction clearance rates, which are just plain wrong.
One of RP Data’s very small competitors, APM, which just happens to be wholly owned by Fairfax, tries to scoop the weekly clearance rate stories by releasing their data on Sunday (with Fairfax reporting on Monday). The problem is that APM ends up relying on a tiny and often at times quite misleading sample of auctions.
So readers opened their Fairfax newspapers on Monday to learn about a “decline in successful auctions” (SMH headline) and how the “Melbourne market loses zing” (AFR headline). Yet both these stories and the data they are based were wrong.
The ASX-listed RP Data waits until the Thursday following each weekend to release its much larger and more representative auction results (which can often comprise samples that are more than twice the size of APM’s data).
And so, contrary to what Fairfax told us on Monday, auction clearance rates in both Sydney (76 per cent based on 395 auctions, the same rate/number as the week before) and Melbourne (84 per cent based on 848 auctions) were exceptionally strong last weekend. In fact, both Melbourne’s clearance rate and the number of properties brought to market were improvements on the week prior (82 per cent based on 602 auctions).
The real news last weekend was Brisbane’s outstanding 69 per cent clearance rate (compared to 59 per cent the week prior – Brisbane rates have averaged 40-50 per cent of late) based on a large sample of 117 auctions, which was significantly more than the 83 properties put to market seven days earlier.
See the data below for more.
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