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Fact Checkers are sent off on a wild goose chase
Date
December 20, 2013
From SMH
What a crazy, zany property year it has been. Early on, Aussie trophies such as Altona and the ‘Bang and Olufsen’ house went to Chinese interests – for $52 million and $33.5 million apiece no less.
Perhaps that’s what fired up the property market this year? All those rich Chinese, armed with their $5 million Significant Investor Visas, wanting Sydney property. A harbour view would be nice, but these invaders would be just as happy if you had an 8 in your house number, or you were on a big block near a posh school. No matter if it was an old house, they’d just knock it down and build a brand new one.
By the Queen’s Birthday Weekend in June, after everyone had the stylists through to make sure their homes had the right feng shui, the Sydney auction market roared back to life. Auction clearance rates of 80 per cent, every weekend just about. Nothing to do with the lowest interest rates since the 1950s, of course.
Harbourside splurge: Elton John (bottom right) once had his eye on the Bang and Olufsen house at Point Piper, which Bruce McWilliam (top right) has sold for $33 million. Photo: Tim Mooney (main photo), Mal Fairclough, Andrew Quilty
Or the need to upgrade. The market had been dead as a doornail, everyone had had kids and were exploding out of their tiny flats and terraces, and they were just itching to find something bigger.
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Not to mention the investors, switching to bricks and mortar, knocking out first-timers at auctions. They were armed with their self-managed super funds. People started talking about booms and bubbles and the headline writers got terribly excited.
On election day on September 7, when there were just 215 auctions because sellers got spooked thinking the buyers would be voting, the clearance rate was 87.6 per cent. It was one of the highest clearance rates on record.
Now there was no stopping the property market. Listings had been few and far between in the first half, but now everyone wanted to sell: the big 600-auction days of September became 900 by November, as buyers became sellers of their redundant properties.
Then, just 11 days before Christmas, the biggest auction day ever of almost 1000 auctions and 300 more this Saturday.
Ludicrous.
But not quite so ludicrous as the ABC’s so-called ‘‘Fact Check’’ service, which reckons it has found the real reason for all this property-buying nonsense. And it’s nothing to do with pent-up demand or low interest rates – or the Chinese.
No, it was everything to do with the devious auction clearance rates methods of Australian Property Monitors, owned by Fairfax Media. Those dastardly analysts were cooking the books, or, the Fact Checker said, ‘‘fudging the figures’’ with its auction results reporting.
The Fact Checkers revelation was that, surprise surprise, the APM team had failed to collect 100 per cent of the results from agents by Saturday night and based their clearance rates on a mere 70 per cent! The scoundrels!
Never mind that APM has used the same methodology for decades, through booms and busts. And others, such as RP Data and real estate institutes used exactly the same clearance rate methodology. Or that election voting intentions are decided on polls of about 1000 people from 23 million.
The fact checkers – and the ABC News editors who thought the findings so worthy that they made the headlines last Sunday night – swallowed hook, line and sinker the crazy ramblings of an Aquasia credit strategist called Mark Bayley.
This Mr Bayley has been venting his spleen for a month now in articles in the Australian Financial Review: ‘‘Buyers at risk from misleading clearance figures’’; ‘‘Lies, damned lies’’ and ‘‘1438 auctions missing: Sydney’s Impossible Property Search’’.
He thinks all this dodgy stuff had ‘‘the ability to panic buyers into the market’’.
What’s Mr Bayley’s proposed solution to all this? That the clearance rate should be based on an assumption: all of the unreported results are properties that didn’t sell.
So, for example, rather than the 76.1 per cent from the 636 results that APM knew about on Saturday, the true rate, he says, was ‘‘a dim 51.2 per cent’’ from the 995 scheduled auctions.
Now you’d expect the ABC ‘‘Fact Check’’ service to come down hard on that kind of methodology. That truly would be ‘‘‘fudging the figures’’. But instead of inquiring into that wisdom, ‘‘Fact Check’’ chose to condemn the data provider – specifically APM.
When the market is acting crazy, independent data providers are an essential tool for buyers and sellers wanting to make sane decisions. APM’s clearance rate isn’t perfect, but it’s the best measure we have. We’d all love to have a complete data set to work with, but if we waited for that we’d end up with no independent analysis of auctions on weekends beyond agent hype. I’ll stick with APM’s usual sample of about 70 per cent of the results, thanks. P |
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