I believe that the auctions tell you everything you need to know about the marketplace. In most cases it will give you fair warning (3-6 months) of the effect of change in sentiment, the impact of legislation or other material factors (e.g. lending appetite/restrictions).

The speed, volume and diversity of assets offered and sold by auction (online or traditional) represents some of the most valuable data to track and measure the market on a monthly basis. When looking for these warning signs (markers/indicators) I tend to ignore the guide price and the eventual sale price – I am purely looking at; asset class, volume of said asset class and sales success rate.

It is important to run these data sets on multiple asset classes – this helps you to identify where the supply and demand metrics either meet or miss the mark. The ability to predict a change in appetite (or what the next trend is) helps to identify which properties to trade and how active the buyer pool is for said property.

The challenges we (property investors & developers) have faced over the last five years – matched with the increase (generally) in property values since the early recovery in 2012 from the 2007/8 crash, a lot of us have been wondering perhaps a little sceptically, when will the market correction come?

It can be argued that 2016/7 saw some correction to the market (in the form of overall stagnation/value plateau), but those corrections were for the most part localised to specific areas of the country. Generally, volatility has come in the form of, legislative changes and tax changes.

For a trader, these issues in the main are not necessarily immediately impactful on business. The same cannot be said for flipping and this is ever more prevalent in the market we find ourselves in currently.