National Auction Market Stutters
Fewer listings and market distractions keep results stagnant.
Fewer listings and market distractions keep results stagnant.
The national auction market reported a clearance rate of 73.8% at the weekend – similar to the previous weekend’s 73.8% but well below the 85.3% recorded over the same weekend last year.
National auction numbers were lower at the weekend — with wild weather and Labour Day holidays driving the dip in numbers. The market saw 1585 homes listed for auction nationally compared to the 2377 of the previous weekend and well below the 1903 reported for the same Saturday last year.
Despite the meek showing, auction markets are set to return at full pace next weekend as regions recover from flooding and are free from holiday distractions.
The Sydney auction market recorded a clearance rate of 69.8% at the weekend – well below the 76.6% of the previous weekend and a stark comparison to the 90.6% recorded over the same weekend last year.
The NSW capital recorded 884 listings — which is up on the previous weekend’s 841 and well ahead of the 716 auctioned over the same weekend last year.
Sydney recorded a median price of $1,605,500 for houses sold at auction at the weekend – lower than the $1,915,000 reported over the previous weekend and 3.6% higher than the $1,550,000 recorded over the same weekend last year.
Melbourne’s market posted a clearance rate of 70.3% on Saturday – lower than last weekend’s 73.8% and remained well below the 81.5% recorded over the same weekend last year – a non-holiday weekend.
The Victorian capital reported 423 homes listed for auction, which is well down on the previous weekend’s 120 and significantly lower to last year’s non-holiday 9878 auctioned over the same weekend last year.
Melbourne recorded a median price of $1,008,000 for houses sold at auction at the weekend — lower than last weekend’s 1,170,000 but 2.9% higher than the $980,000 recorded over the same weekend last year.
Data powered by Dr Andrew Wilson, My Housing Market.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
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
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.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’