Real estate companies say they are seeing more houses being sold at auction in Otago.
Harcourts Otago said there was a clear increase in auctions in the region with 15 houses sold that way in October and a further 26 sold in November.
Harcourts Dunedin branch manager Richard Stringer said a property in Macandrew Bay about two weeks ago drew nearly 40 bids and sold for $646,150 after the bidding started at $400,000.
"I can’t publish how far above reserve we were but least to say we had ecstatic owners.
"We were down to $50 bids in the end, that’s how much two people just didn’t want to lose that opportunity to own the property."
Mr Stringer said a week before that he was offered whitebait from a bidder who had run out of money.
Auctions were proving popular with both buyers and sellers because of the transparency of that mode of sale.
"We come across people that have missed out on three, four, five houses in multi-offer situations where they have no idea of how much they missed out by."
Vendors were enjoying auctions because they were able to set the terms and the auction was conducted on those terms, Mr Stringer said.
Auctions across New Zealand were up 63% in Harcourts sales compared to last year.
Strong early interest meant 18% of the auctions were being brought forward from the advertised auction date.
In Dunedin there had traditionally been a lot of "price by negotiation" sales and that trend had recently gone towards more deadline sales, Mr Stringer said.
About 20% of Harcourts sales in Dunedin were being sold by auction.
Bayleys Metro managing partner Mark Stevens said auctions were becoming more popular throughout Otago, with an increase of about 10% to 15% on last year.
"Basically it’s near enough to 100% success rate in Dunedin, Cromwell and Queenstown at the moment.
"Queenstown’s not quite as many, but certainly in Dunedin pretty much every house is sold on the day or before the day."
It was indicative of a hot market that houses were selling so easily and it did not really matter what method of sale was chosen.
"There’s just a huge demand for property."
He said auctions, while increasing, were not the favoured choice of sale in Dunedin with about 30 of the 250 or so listed properties on the market now up for auction.
When the market was booming it was better not to try to put a price on a property and so sale by tender, deadline or auction were more popular methods of selling, Mr Stevens said.
