Cotality’s final clearance rate for the week ending 4 October 2026 put Brisbane at 21.2 per cent, the lowest it has been here since 30 November 2008, when it was 21.1 per cent. That became the week’s proof that Brisbane had fallen over. It came off 138 auctions.
I am the sole director of a property company that buys, renovates and resells houses in Logan and Ipswich, with one house under contract and another mid-renovation. I read these releases as a vendor rather than a commentator, and that number has never once told me anything I could act on.
Tl; dr;
- The auction clearance rate measures a sliver of Brisbane. On Domain’s figures 92.1 per cent of listings here never start as an auction at all.
- Brisbane’s 21.2 per cent came off 138 auctions. A sample that small moves on its own.
- Two numbers do the job instead: days on market, now a median of 39 against 23 a year ago, and sales volumes, down 27.2 per cent in Brisbane.
- Those numbers say the market has softened. You just could not have learnt it from Saturday’s auctions.
Why the auction clearance rate cannot carry that weight
The combined capitals finished at 45.4 per cent off 1,212 auctions, 38.1 per cent fewer than a year earlier. ABC News reported it on 8 October as the lowest combined result since July.
Brisbane’s slice of that was 138 auctions, two fewer than the 140 held a week earlier. A shrinking sample gives a jumpier number, and jumpier numbers make better headlines.
Then there is the part that gets left out. On Domain data reported in September, Brisbane had the largest proportion of listings that started directly as a private treaty sale, at 92.1 per cent. It also had the largest conversion rate at 67.6 per cent, with more than two thirds of auctions switching to a private treaty sale before the day arrived.
So the figure is a sentiment reading off a sliver of a sliver. It tells you how nervous one room was on Saturday morning. It says nothing about whether a renovated three bedroom house will sell, because that house was never going to auction.
Better number one: how long a sale takes
In Cotality’s Home Value Index for September, research director Tim Lawless wrote that “Capital city homes are now taking a median of 39 days to sell compared with 23 days a year ago, resulting in an accumulation of advertised supply”. That is a combined capitals median rather than a Brisbane one, and it is still the number with a dollar sign attached.
Sixteen extra days is sixteen more days of interest, rates, insurance and lawn mowing on a house earning nothing. Nobody holding stock experiences a soft market as a percentage. You experience it as a calendar.
Supply explains it. New listings across the capitals were 9.2 per cent lower than a year ago, yet total inventory was 23.1 per cent higher. Stock is arriving more slowly and leaving far more slowly than that.
Better number two: how many sales happen at all
This is the one I watch hardest, and it barely got reported. Sales over the three months to the end of September were 19.1 per cent below a year ago nationally, and worst of all in Brisbane at 27.2 per cent.
A clearance rate can fall simply because fewer people bid. Volume down by more than a quarter means fewer sales are completing by any method, which is far harder to explain away, and it compounds: every sale that does not happen is stock somebody still holds next month.
What those numbers actually say
They say the market has softened, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Brisbane led the capitals down at 1.5 per cent in September and is off 4.7 per cent over the quarter, although still up 5.9 per cent over the year on a median value of $1,048,880. Lawless called it a “negative housing cycle”.
That is the honest position. The decline is real and the clearance rate is still the wrong place to read it. One is a measurement, the other is a mood.
How I am organising around it
On 29 September the RBA raised the cash rate target by 25 basis points to 4.60 per cent, unanimously. I will not claim that caused the October auctions. It happened first, that is all.
What it changes is the budget line I watch. When this cycle started I wrote about how I approach rising interest rates, and that thinking still holds, except the pressure has moved from the loan to the listing period. I now price a renovation against 39 days on market rather than 23, and I keep the admin on each flip delegated so a longer campaign costs me money and not attention.
Summary
If you are selling in Brisbane, give the auction clearance rate almost none of your attention. It is drawn from 138 auctions in a city where nine in ten homes never go to one. Watch days on market and sales volumes instead. Budget for a campaign weeks longer than last year’s and the softness becomes a scheduling problem rather than a surprise.
we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Warren E. Buffett, Chairman’s Letter to the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. for 1986, dated 27 February 1987
