It is always a cathartic process writing an article for Property investor News because it forces me to not just know what I am seeing on a daily/weekly auction cycle basis but I get an opportunity to double check my observations with the data (provided by EIG) and also to work through my thoughts and opinions on the market to try and make sense of it, not only for our own purposes, but to assist others with their view of the market too.

I had decided that the quality of data for a year-on-year comparison 2020-2021 was going to throw out some potentially unreliable data. So, I have expanded the data set range to include 2019. I thought that this may provide a greater comparison, if only to highlight the effect of Covid and the changes in investing behaviour. So as not to write a 50,000-word discourse I will be focusing on the same auction period (April/May) for those highlighted years (2019/2020/2021).

The range set is important because it gives clear enough data to show how the market was operating pre-Covid, how it was operating during Covid and how it looks to change as restrictions are relaxed in the 2021.

The focus of the article will be around the commercial space, which only accounts for approximately a 6th of the lots offered on an auction-by-auction cycle basis (every 5-7 weeks depending on auctioneer). These numbers are based on national figures and therefore are blended and averaged out.

Headline Auction figures for the three data sets below.

I had noticed that a lot of my thoughts and views of the commercial properties in auction and the results that were being achieved were all focused on the impact of Covid restrictions. Whilst I still feel that a lot of the trends and results being seen with commercial property within the auction space can be attributed to Covid, not all of what is being seen can be laid completely at the feet of Covid-19.