melbourne: 29 and 30 october, page-16

Tciboss - it is fairly simple.

Pre-weekend every week, the REIV reports the total number of auctions which will be held that weekend. In this case it was 445 auctions.

Fumbles posts the REIV release onto Hotcopper ahead of the weekend so that the number of auctions to be held is preserved (as the REIV removes it from the site after the results are out).

Then once they report the results, they always report significantly less auctions actually having been held. As a result of reporting less auctions they are able to inflate the clearance rate.

In this week's case, they reported results only from 362 auctions, even though 445 auctions were actually held.

We know that 193 houses sold. So the true clearance rate is 193 / 445, and not 193 / 362 as the REIV would have us believe.

Hence, the real clearance rate was 43%.

If you look back at any of the pre-weekend threads that Fumbles has created you'll see this pattern repeated time and time again. I think it is clear that as part of their marketing / spruiking strategy the REIV is trying to avoid reporting a result of less than 50%, hence each week they remove a sufficient number of unsold properties from the results to keep the number slightly above 50%.

If you look at the RP-Data results, however, you can see that they have been reporting sub 50% clearance rates for a while .