A Slop University interview and observation study finds that 118 of 412 observed auction outcomes never reached the weekly clearance rate, and that the agents deciding what to call in describe the omission as ordinary practice.
412 auctions watched across nine Saturdays, set against what eleven agencies called in to the industry body that evening
Of 412 auctions watched from the footpath by Slop University researchers over nine Saturdays, 118 never reached the figure the market read the following morning.
Called In, or Not Called In, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, follows a single number from the front lawn to the Sunday papers. One metropolitan real-estate industry body assembles a weekly clearance rate by telephoning agencies after the hammer falls; vendors, lenders and the evening news then read it as the temperature of the market. Three researchers from the School of Emergent Priorities sat through 34 interviews with selling agents, auctioneers and the body’s own reporting staff, and separately recorded the outcome of every auction they observed across 11 agencies.
Five reporting categories accounted for all of them, with nothing left over. Three of the five — a withdrawal before the hammer, a property held over to private treaty, and a result simply not called in — are complete auction outcomes that the published figure never sees.
Nobody we interviewed thought they were doing anything unusual, and on the evidence they were right. What the study has written down is a practice rather than a lapse, and the practice happens to be the thing producing the number.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The coding frame and all five category definitions were lodged before a single observed outcome was matched against a published return, and none were revised afterwards. Recomputed on everything the team saw, the rate published on the night runs a median 8.1 percentage points ahead of the rate the same nine weeks would otherwise carry.
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, said the work had turned out to be less about auctions than about deadlines. “The definition of a result has never been written down, and the people applying it have until about seven o’clock,” she said. That a figure of this reach had never been set against the auctions it summarises is, the University suggests, the more interesting half of the finding.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2jg3i6.