Cotality auction results · 13 weeks to 8 August 2026
Everyone has a view on property since the budget. We watched 13 Saturdays of auctions instead.
Since the budget rewired how property investors are taxed, most conversations we have about the market open with a forecast. Rather than talking about predictions, we have been collecting Cotality's auction results every week since mid May, thirteen Saturdays of them now, to see what buyers are actually doing. The most recent Saturday, 8 August, put 1,382 homes under the hammer across the combined capitals for a 51.4 per cent clearance rate. Scroll on and you can watch every one of those 1,382 auctions sort themselves into what really happened, and then see what thirteen weeks of Saturdays say about where this market is going.
By Gabriel Loh, Managing Director, FGO Finance Group · 20 August 2026
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Saturday 8 August 2026
1,382 auctions, one Saturday
The number everyone quotes
Cotality counted 1,382 homes at auction across the combined capitals on Saturday 8 August, and the clearance rate they reported that night came in at 51.4 per cent.
What that figure cannot tell you is whether a home never faced a bidder or sold well above reserve, because both of those outcomes count exactly the same way once they are folded into the average.
What actually happened
Sort the same 1,382 by outcome and five very different stories appear. 169 homes, about 12 per cent of the total, were withdrawn before bidding even started, pulled by the seller or their agent somewhere ahead of Saturday, while another 502, around 36 per cent, were passed in when a bidder turned up and nobody met the reserve.
The selling itself split three ways: 213 homes changed hands before Saturday arrived, negotiated ahead of the auction itself, 484 sold under the hammer on the day, which is the outcome the word auction actually describes, and a further 14 were negotiated afterward once the auction had produced no buyer.
Withdrawn still counts as a fail
The official clearance rate treats a withdrawn home exactly the same way it treats a passed-in one, counting both as a fail, even though a withdrawn home never had the chance to fail in the first place because it was pulled before a single bid was placed.
Same day, six different markets
Sort by city instead and the auction stops looking like one national event. In Sydney, 48.5 per cent of every auction sale across the past seven Saturdays was agreed before auction day, which means the date on the listing is now working as a negotiation deadline rather than the moment the price gets set.
The last auction floor
Melbourne is the outlier, with 36.1 per cent of everything reported selling under the hammer, which makes it the last capital where the auction floor still does most of the work.
Brisbane sits at the other end, passing in more than half of everything it reports, and Perth barely runs auctions at all, with nine reported across the whole city on 8 August.
Thirteen Saturdays, one moving picture
A single Saturday tells you what happened. Thirteen in a row tell you where the market is moving. This chart traces the combined capitals clearance rate week by week since mid May, then splits it into the five state capitals underneath so you can watch the mix shift. Step through the four phases in the order they happened.
Who left the market, and who stayed
The dots above tell you what happened on the lawn. The lending data tells you who stopped turning up to bid. Loan Market Group's July market report has national home loan lodgements down 26 per cent by number since early February, and inside that fall one category stands apart. Investor lodgements are down 35 per cent by value, the sharpest decline of any borrower type in the report. Equifax's June bureau data points the same way, with mortgage enquiries down 14 per cent year on year and not a single state in positive territory.
The timing lines up with the budget, which moved negative gearing from an annual deduction to a carry-forward loss and pushed several lenders to rework how investor tax benefits count in their servicing calculators. Put those two things together and the picture behind the clearance rate sharpens. The buyers who left this market are overwhelmingly investors responding to a tax change. The buyers still raising a hand on Saturdays skew toward people purchasing a home to live in, and that goes a long way toward explaining why auction results found a floor while the headlines kept getting worse.
Victoria, for what it is worth, is the most resilient lodgement market in the country in that same Loan Market report, down 19 per cent against the national 26. That is the same signal the Melbourne line above has been sending every Saturday since early July.
Our read after thirteen Saturdays is this. The market fell hard through June and early July, and it has now spent three weeks refusing to fall further. The forecasters remain divided, with major banks still projecting price falls into 2027 while the auction floor quietly firms and Melbourne keeps outperforming, and a divided market is exactly what those two signals sitting side by side look like. What we keep seeing on the ground is that buyers willing to move during periods of reduced competition are getting access to better stock with fewer hands against them. Refinancing is also coming up more often in our conversations, with the cash rate on hold at 4.35 per cent and every borrower carrying a view on where it goes next. If you are weighing a purchase, or wondering whether your current loan still fits the market this data describes, we are here to help through all the market noise, so please reach out.
The clearance rate is the share of reported auctions that resulted in a sale, whether agreed before auction day, under the hammer, or in negotiation immediately after. Withdrawn homes count as fails even though they never faced a bidder, which is why the headline number can understate real buyer demand.
Are auction clearance rates improving in 2026?
Across the combined capitals the rate slid from 58.2 per cent in late May to a floor of 45.3 per cent on Saturday 18 July, then printed 49.7, 48.9 and 51.4 per cent across the following three Saturdays. Three consecutive weeks holding above the low reads like a floor forming, though more Saturdays are needed to confirm a trend.
Which capital city has the strongest auction market right now?
Melbourne. It has not cleared below 49.6 per cent all winter and rose four Saturdays in a row to 56.8 per cent on 8 August. Brisbane sits at the other end, passing in more than half of what it reports each week, and Perth runs too few auctions weekly to read meaningfully.
