Every Monday, an auction “clearance rate” lands as a single percentage. This brief decomposes it — a preliminary count, a final that revises it, and a denominator that includes withdrawn auctions.
For the auction weekend ending 19 April 2026, Cotality's combined-capitals preliminary clearance rate of 60.7% was revised down to 54.9% on final numbers — a 5.8 percentage-point revision. Same weekend, same metric, counted twice.
It is one of the most-quoted numbers in Australian property: the weekend auction clearance rate, a single percentage that arrives every Monday and stands in for the health of the housing market. Cotality's most recent figure — the combined capitals, the weekend ending 17 May 2026 — was 57.5%.
It is a real figure, published by a respected data house. It is also a preliminary one. Cotality labels Monday's number preliminary itself: it is collected the day after the auctions, on a partial set of results. A final rate follows each Thursday, once more results have been gathered — and it is not, as a rule, the same number.
This brief places the two side by side. The point is not that the headline is wrong. It is that “57.5% cleared” answers a specific question — what did a partial Monday count show? — and a reader who takes it as what did the weekend's auctions finally clear? has read a number that is not yet settled.
The clearance-rate headline that circulates on Monday is preliminary. Cotality publishes a final rate the following Thursday, on a fuller result set. On the verified weekend, the two were 5.8 percentage points apart.
| Reading | What it is | Clearance rate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preliminary | the Monday figure — collected the day after the weekend, on a partial result set | 60.7% | Cotality · reported 4 May 2026 |
| Final | the Thursday figure — a fuller result set; here, 5.8 pp lower | 54.9% | Cotality · reported 4 May 2026 |
The revision is structural, not an error. In the hours after an auction weekend the result set is partial; the rate settles as the rest of the results are collected. The reason the settle runs downward is the generally-understood one: reported sales tend to be logged faster than passed-in and withdrawn results, so the early, partial set over-represents sales. Cotality's own methodology states the preliminary-and-final distinction directly — and on the verified weekend ending 19 April 2026, the preliminary 60.7% became a final 54.9%.
It is a revision of degree — 5.8 percentage points — not a reversal. The auction market still cleared more than half its homes that weekend on either count. But the number that circulated on Monday, and the number Cotality settled on by Thursday, were not the same. AU-04 cites this one verified pair; it does not generalise it into a fixed “typical revision,” and it does not forecast where the 17 May preliminary 57.5% will settle.
The clearance rate is sold properties over a denominator — and the denominator is not “the auctions that went ahead.” It is every known auction result, withdrawn and passed-in listings included.
“Auction clearance rates are calculated for auctions scheduled during the week ending Sunday and are based on available data using total known number of sold properties before, at or after auction against the total known number of auction results, including passed in and withdrawn auctions.”
So the clearance rate is not a success rate among auctions that proceeded. If a seller withdraws a listing before auction day, that property does not leave the calculation — it sits in the denominator as a non-sale. Counting it that way is a deliberate, sound design choice: excluding withdrawals would let a soft market flatter its own rate by simply pulling weak listings. The brief alleges nothing against the method. It only makes the reading explicit — “57.5% cleared” already counts the homes that were pulled before they reached the block.
The combined-capitals figure is a weekly average, and an average can sit a long way from the places beneath it. On the weekend ending 17 May 2026, Cotality's city breakdown ran from Perth at 38.9% to Adelaide at 75.7% — with the national 57.5% laid across all of them.
| City | Preliminary clearance rate | Auctions held |
|---|---|---|
| Adelaide | 75.7% | 147 |
| Melbourne | 61.4% | 906 |
| Brisbane | 55.7% | 177 |
| Sydney | 49.2% | 616 |
| Perth | 38.9% | 25 |
| Combined capitals | 57.5% | 1,939 |
And the national rate is, in practice, a two-city number. Sydney (616 auctions) and Melbourne (906) were together 1,522 of the 1,939 combined-capitals auctions that weekend — about 78%. When Sydney's preliminary rate fell to 49.2% — which Cotality described as its weakest since auction results were disrupted in the early-COVID period of April 2020 — it pulled heavily on the combined figure, because Sydney is a large part of the combined figure.
None of this makes the 57.5% wrong. It makes it an average — a single percentage with a wide distribution underneath, and a heavy two-city weight inside it.
AU-04 follows AU-01, AU-02, and AU-03 inside The Australian Property Decode. The first brief decomposed how Australia measures the price of a house; the second, the rent on one; the third, the borrower carrying the loan. The fourth decomposes the auction result — the weekly clearance rate.
The series asks one question of each published property figure: which population — or which moment — does this number actually describe? For the clearance rate, the moment is the answer: a Monday count is a partial one, and a Thursday final is the settled one. The headline rarely says which it is. The brief does.
General information only. The scenario below is a modelled illustration, built to make the data concrete — it is not advice, and it describes no real person, household, or transaction.
Picture a modelled household following the housing market the way most people do — through the headline. On Monday they read that auctions “cleared 57.5 percent” over the weekend. They file it: the market is middling, a little soft. The number has done its work — it has set their sense of where the market stands.
But that 57.5% is Cotality's preliminary combined-capitals rate, collected the day after the weekend on a partial result set — Cotality labels it preliminary itself. A final rate follows on Thursday, on a fuller set. On the verified weekend ending 19 April 2026, a preliminary 60.7% was revised to 54.9% — 5.8 points lower. The Monday number this household read is real; it is simply not the one Cotality settles on.
And the figure is a ratio with a particular denominator: sold properties over all known auction results, withdrawn and passed-in auctions included. “57.5% cleared” is not “of the auctions that went ahead, this share sold” — it already counts the listings that were pulled before auction day.
The composite is illustrative — a modelled household, not a surveyed one. Its only purpose is to make the decomposition concrete: a clearance rate is a fast, partial, weekly snapshot, and the version that travels is the Monday one. The brief offers no view on what this household should do with the number, and no suggestion to bid or hold off — only on which number it is: a preliminary count, not a final result.
If you read one thing: the Monday clearance-rate headline is a preliminary, partial count — Cotality's final, published Thursday, can land several points lower. Read which number it is, and which weekend it covers.
Australia's weekly auction clearance rate is not a settled number. It is a preliminary figure — Cotality's combined-capitals 57.5% for the weekend ending 17 May 2026, collected the day after the auctions on a partial result set. Cotality publishes a final rate each Thursday; on the verified weekend ending 19 April 2026 the preliminary 60.7% was revised down to 54.9% — a 5.8-point revision. And the rate is a ratio whose denominator includes withdrawn and passed-in auctions. Mirror Brief AU-04 makes one claim: read whether an auction clearance rate is the preliminary Monday figure or the final Thursday figure — and which week-ending Sunday it covers — before reading it as “what the market cleared.” Every figure here is verbatim from Cotality's own releases and methodology. The brief alleges nothing against Cotality — it publishes the preliminary/final distinction and the denominator rule openly, and each rate is correct for what it is.
Mirror format — RAOSCAFF anchors on Cotality's own filed auction releases and its published auction-results methodology page, places the preliminary clearance rate beside the final, and decomposes the design that makes them differ. No primary data collection, no analyst estimate, no extrapolation. Phase 0 reframed AU-04 to a single-publisher decomposition: Domain's auction figures could not be verified to a Domain primary publication, so the brief decomposes Cotality's series only and makes no cross-publisher comparison.
Every figure traces to a Cotality weekly release or the Cotality auction-results methodology page, fetched live on 21 May 2026 by Phase 0. The load-bearing figures — the weekend-ending-17-May headline and the weekend-ending-19-April revision pair — were re-verified the same day against the primary Cotality release content; several Cotality press-release URLs served stale cached pages on direct fetch, and each figure was confirmed against the live release. Every clearance rate carries its exact week-ending Sunday, and reference periods are never blended. Full source list in the companion FACTS.md.
FACTS.md is the source-of-truth file; every figure in this report traces to it. The hero is a single-weekend preliminary-to-final revision panel — the weekend ending 19 April 2026, 60.7% settling to 54.9% — drawn on an honest zero-baseline, with the preliminary and final kept as one metric at two collection times and never on a shared axis with another weekend.
AU-04 is single-publisher (Cotality); it makes no Domain or PropTrack claim. One preliminary-to-final pair was verbatim-verified — the brief cites no fixed “typical revision” figure and forecasts no weekend's final, including the weekend-ending-17-May 57.5%. The weekend ending 10 May 2026 combined rate is not cited (not confirmed to the required precision from the primary release). The brief does not adjudicate whether the preliminary or the final is the “better” number — each is correct for what it is.
Predict-not-recommend. Defamation-disciplined: the brief critiques what the metric measures and how the headline is read — never the integrity or competence of Cotality or any person; Cotality publishes the preliminary/final distinction, the Thursday finals, and the denominator rule openly, and the brief states so. ASIC-clear: auction clearance-rate data is direct-property market data, not a financial product; the brief cites no security and gives no advice — no suggestion to any buyer or seller to bid, buy, list, or sell.