With the beautiful sunshine today and the water a tad warmer for swimming this week, it feels like spring may be coming early. There you go—a good news climate change story!

Today, on our last relatively free Saturday until Christmas, we chose three random auctions to attend, just to ensure we haven’t been in a bubble these past few weeks.

Different locations, different property types, different price points. Different PPPs.

And wow—they were powerful—all three, each reinforcing something significant about the market.

Today’s biggest auction in more ways than one!

An amazing 432 bids at Anderson Road, Hawthorn East—432, yes 432.

That’s because you have two people who start, who are fighters and who don’t want to give up.

That’s because you go up in thousands for hundreds of thousands.

But that’s because you have a pro operation with Scott Patterson conducting. However, it’s not an individual gold medal for him; no, this was a 3-person team pursuit, with two others on the podium who nobody will mention: team players Tom Staughton and Jacqui Bendall, who shared in the gold.

The 50 Anderson Road Shoot Out was about 2 bidders, but it was also about 3 agents working seamlessly together to allow the drama to unfold.

The 50 Anderson Road 432-bid Shoot Out was a great movie to watch—it started slowly, with a bit of drama unfolding between bidder 1 and bidder 2, making bidder 2 the bad guy (they knew each other). Then bidder 3 took on the bad guy, only to lose to exhaustion over 400 bids later.

But what wasn’t so obvious was the scriptwriting and directing behind the scenes. Sure, all eyes were on Captain Scott, but the debonair Cary Grant, aka Tom Staughton, positioned at the top of the hill, moved slowly behind the scenes to bidder 3, cajoling, encouraging, suggesting, pushing, laughing, urging, assuring, and joking with bidder 3 from Bid 20 or so to Bid 431.

Mata Hari, aka Jacqui Bendall, was on the lower side next to bidder 2 and did the same from Bid number 4 to Bid 432. They both won Academy Awards as best supporting actors/actresses to the lead.

Maybe this was an even better auction in Brighton.

Despite the above, for me, the best-structured auction was in Brighton. 400 bids fewer, but a brilliantly thought-out and executed sale.

It sold well because it was well-designed, well-built, and well-marketed. Brighton has felt like a graveyard at times this year, so selling a south-facing one-of-a-pair when many are not was smart by all involved. It had something extra special besides a great floor plan—a lift at a great price. This feature attracted the downsizer market to a two-story sub-$4m brand new home in a brilliantly located area. By skipping a basement, they saved $500,000 on the build, which would have priced them out of the area. Well done—a lot of good thoughts.

But it wasn’t just the home—the auction too had some powerful performances from its lead (Johnny Clarkson), but there were supporting actors standing next to buyers, urging, laughing, crying, pushing, pulling, guiding, and smiling alongside them in the process and they were Leanne Potter, Gary Yue and Guy St Leger. Lovely to watch.

If either of those auctions had not had a strong underbidder, both would have played the game for half a million less. The quoting was spot on, the execution brilliant, and the ensuing luck from good planning favoured the seller and not the buyers on these occasions.

A sign of the market improving? Maybe, but it’s early days—one thing auction 3 in Toorak confirmed is that any sort of hit-and-hope mentality is being rejected by this weaker market when you dish up a C-grader, as happened at the auction in Toorak.

In movie parlance, it was a flop, but it never had a chance anyway.

Three Key Takeaways from Today:

1. Price can turn any home into a C-Grader—and, of course, into a B or A-Grader.
   C-Graders are not selling, no matter how talented the agent.
   
   
2. The market is tough, but if you price a good home correctly, there are still buyers who will fight for it. The size of the fight depends partially on luck but also on the agent’s preparation and skill.
   
   
3. The auctions today reaffirmed today that the price sandwich was about the top slice, (the sale process such asking, agent, etc.), and the home’s filling of PPPs more so than the underlying market bottom slice.
   
   There are still too many vendors who believe their home has had significant growth in the last 5 to 8 years – that was true in 2021, but this is 2024 and much (not all) of the market has dropped in the last 3 years. The other layer of the sandwich (sales campaign) and the filling (your PPPs) need to be A-Grade for a significant price uplift.