Across South East Queensland, auctions are passing in. Open homes are quiet. Buyers are hesitant and slow to commit.
Cotality’s numbers confirm it. Heading into our auction, Brisbane โ the closest reported auction market to us โ finalised a clearance rate of 35.4%, which Cotality described as the weakest of the large markets. Nationally, the weighted clearance rate finalised at 45.3%, down from 69.4% in the same week a year earlier.
Cotality put the cause plainly: softer buyer demand, stretched affordability, and the cumulative impact of interest rate rises. Clearance rates have slid from around 70% last September to below 50% through June and July.
Source: Cotality, Final Clearance Rates โ week ending 19 July 2026, published 22 July 2026.
If your home is on the market and nothing is happening, that data feels personal.
So let me show you something that changes how you read it.
What we actually took to auction
On Sunday 2 August, we auctioned 1692 Steve Irwin Way, Beerwah.
Let me be honest about what we were selling.
Two bedrooms. One bathroom. Two car.
Holes through the rooms. Asbestos in the walls. Electricity cut off. Kitchen out of action. Toilet out of action.
As I told The Courier-Mail, it was basically a knockdown.
That is the property. Now add the market: barely one auction in three was clearing.
What happened anyway
27 days on market.
3 written offers before auction day.
9 registered bidders.
5 of them actively fighting for it.
A crowd of 40 people standing in the yard.
Bidding opened at $500,000. It moved past $1 million. It flew past the reserve. After roughly 40 bids, the hammer fell at $1.5 million.
The sellers did not expect it. Neither did I, to be honest.
The number that explains everything
Here is the part most people miss.
A few weeks earlier, a nearby property sold for $1.33 million.
Five bedrooms. Three bathrooms. Four car. Two hectares of land.
Modern. Liveable. Roughly double our land size, and several times the house.
On paper, it was the better property in every single category. It sold for $170,000 less than ours.
Same suburb. Same month. Same buyers reading the same headlines.
So what separated them?
One sold quietly, in front of a small handful of buyers. Ours sold in front of 40 people, with 9 registered bidders and 5 of them fighting.
The house did not set the price. Ours was the worse house by a distance.
The market did not set the price. It was the same market on both days.
The competition set the price.
Nine bidders in one yard, able to see each other, produced a number that a superior property sold quietly could not reach.
How the pool gets built
Buyers do not appear. They are found.
Our audience sits at more than 24,000 people across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn โ local, interstate and overseas. RE/MAX operates in more than 120 countries. Our buyers have come from 13 of them. And as the #1 Auction Agent for RE/MAX Australia, I have spent years building the one asset a soft market rewards: a list of people who are already paying attention.
So when a property launches with us, it does not sit on two portals hoping the right person scrolls past at the right moment.
It goes straight to a network that already exists.
That is what fills a yard in a market where yards are empty.
Why auction โ on a house like that
Reach builds the pool.
Auction concentrates it.
Put nine qualified buyers in one place, at one time, where every one of them can see the others, and something important happens: hesitation disappears.
Buyers are uncertain right now. That is real. But uncertainty is a private feeling. It does not survive contact with a raised hand on the other side of the yard.
Buyers saw the competition, and the competition drove the price.
That is the entire mechanism. Not the sign. Not the portal listing. The people standing in the yard on the day.
What this means for your home
When a property sits, the instinct is to blame the market first, then the price, then the home itself.
Look at the mechanics instead.
A house with no power, no kitchen and no working toilet made $1.5 million in the worst clearance-rate market since COVID.
Your home is not the problem.
The market is not the problem.
The size of the pool competing for it is the only question that matters.
A second opinion, not a pitch
If you are already on the market and it has gone quiet, I am happy to review the campaign with you. Not to take the listing โ to show you where the buyer pool is being lost, and what it would take to widen it. What you do with that is entirely your call.
If you are thinking about selling in the next 12 months, the same conversation is worth having early. Strategy set before launch is always worth more than strategy corrected after.
When you see how a price is actually built, you stop waiting for the market to improve.
Our Beerwah result was featured in The Courier-Mail. Read the full article here โ ours is the last property covered, so scroll to the bottom.
