Significant numbers of home buyers and sellers moving to auctions
Two of the biggest property auctioneers say they have seen a huge upsurge in the number of home buyers and discretionary vendors using their auctions.
The UK’s largest auction house has revealed that 39% of the properties sold at its auctions last month were bought as primary homes, contracting the long-held view that auctions are only for investment properties.
IamSold.co.uk, which provides its service to some 2,500 estate agents across the UK, claims the figure proves the Covid crisis has been a game changer for the auctions sector which was able to continue selling homes when estate agents had shut up shop during the lockdown.
This has increased the proportion of ‘homes’ being bought via auctions rather than investment properties, to volume of sales and the range of prices.
IamSold says it sold 445 properties via its Modern Method of Auction last month, an increase of 33% year-on-year while the number of bids increased by 72 per cent.
“Vendors taking advantage of the Stamp Duty holiday and movers wanting to be settled in a new property in time for Christmas are also boosting the market,” says Jamie Cooke (left), MD of IamSold.
“As the average completion time of a traditional Private Treaty sale has slipped to around 19 weeks, auction is helping agents provide a solution to meet these sales deadlines, and at the same time improve their cash flow with seven-day payments after SSTC available.”
Cooke’s comments are echoed by Roger Lake of Auction House, (right) who says his company has seen a ‘huge upsurge in buyers looking to purchase property this way’.
“We seem to be attracting more properties from higher price brackets to offer for sale,” he says.
“And we have opened the door to a group of sellers who wouldn’t previously have considered auction rooms; we are listing those higher-ticket properties and are hammering them down successfully.”
