Lockdown Has Little Effect On Clearance Rate
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Lockdown Has Little Effect On Clearance Rate

The home auction market soldiered on despite digital auctions and mid-winter blues.

By Kanebridge News
Mon, Jul 12, 2021 10:53amGrey Clock < 1 min

Despite lockdowns in Sydney, the national auction market has seemingly skipped past the usual mid-winter slowdown with 2009 homes reported auction on Saturday, July 10.

This result was higher than last weekend’s 1869 listings and more than double the same weekend last year.

The higher auction numbers failed to slowdown buyer activity with the national market reporting a strong clearance rate of 79.5% –  just below the previous weekend’s 79.8%.

Sydney’s auction market is holding on despite the lockdown. Although reporting a year-to-date clearance rate low on Saturday of 76.6%, the figure was just below the 76.9% reported last weekend and well ahead of the 64.6% recorded on the same weekend last year.

782 auctions were reported listed in Sydney on Saturday which was just below the previous weekend’s July record 792 auctions and well above the 452 recorded over the same weekend last year.

Sydney recorded a median price of $1,631,000 for houses sold at auction at the weekend –  well ahead of the $1,500,000 reported over the previous Saturday.

Melbourne’s auction ate was steady at the weekend, with a surge of mid-winter listings.

The Victorian capital Melbourne recorded a clearance rate of 76.7% which was just below the previous weekend’s 76.9% but well ahead of the shutdown impacted the 44.9% of the same weekend last year.

A July record of 977 homes were listed to go under the hammer on Saturday –  well ahead of last weekend’s previous record 853 auctions.

Melbourne recorded a median price of $983,000 for houses sold at auction at the weekend which was lower than the $1,092,000 recorded over the previous weekend and  29.3% higher than the $760,000 recorded over the same weekend last year.

Data powered by Dr Andrew Wilson of My Housing Market.



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Wild cities and concrete corridors: How AI is reimagining the landscape

A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities

By Robyn Willis
Wed, Dec 6, 2023 2 min

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real. 

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes. 

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said. 

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.” 

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that. 

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