We are actively doing our own deals, which involves constant searching, but we are also lucky to be working with a variety of different people who are active property buyers or sellers. That includes members of our Auction Buyers Club at HAMMERED as well as our clients and directors and employees of several auction houses that we do business with regularly.

Recent auctions in June have had a very different feel to the previous months. Even though their sales statistics were still great - with sales success of 80-95%, strong volumes of sales and quite a few bidding wars, there was also room to find properties that didn’t attract many bidders or none at all.

The kind of properties that continue to struggle in auctions are smaller vacant flats, without external amenities, in London. Unless they are income producing from day one, they are not as interesting to bidders as they used to be in the past. The reason is very simply the fact that those flats are less desirable with people spending more time working from home and they can work from places that are further from Central London but more affordable, and more comfortable for 24/7 living.

With our buying club, which we have been running for over a year now, we are continuously reviewing auction lots with an intention of purchasing them. Our club members had some quiet months at the start of the year where they would mostly purchase their properties outside of auction and then look to trade them via auction. In June however, it changed noticeably with four members purchasing six properties worth nearly £1.35m. Two of those properties were purchased in the auction and four of them went unsold and were purchased post-auction. It shows that auctions require persistence in order to pick up deals as the marketplace changes can be subtle and offer no prior notice. You have to be in it, to win it!

In this article, we will cover some of those case studies and the angles that allowed the buyers to make sense of purchasing the properties at those prices.