What auction results tell you that portals cannot

Every other price in property is negotiated in private. The auction room is the exception: a public reserve, a public bid, a public result. That makes auction results the least filtered evidence there is about what buyers will pay right now, and it makes them easy to misread, because the numbers that get published are not the numbers that get quoted.

Guide, reserve, hammer

The guide price is published before the sale and signals where bidding is expected to start. The reserve is the seller's confidential minimum, at or near the guide. The hammer price is what the lot made. A lot that does not reach its reserve is unsold, and that fact is recorded, which is already more than a portal will ever tell you about a withdrawn listing.

The guide price entry in the glossary has the definitions. The trap is in the next section.

The one mistake everyone makes

A guide is published for almost every lot. A hammer price is published by a minority of auctioneers. So in any set of results, the average guide and the average hammer are computed over different lots, and the difference between them means nothing. Subtract one from the other and you have not found an uplift or a discount; you have compared two populations.

MarketCode's auction statistics return both averages with the count of lots behind each, and a comparable flag that is false when the two sets are too unbalanced for the difference to mean anything. The market pages show the two side by side with their counts and refuse to print a difference. Across the platform, about a quarter of lots carry an achieved price and a fifth a net yield, because most auction houses publish the guide and never the result. That coverage is a constraint, not a caveat, and it is stated wherever the numbers appear.

Sale rate is the temperature

The share of lots offered that sold is the cleanest read of a local market's appetite. A district where seven in ten lots clear is a different market from one where three in ten do, whatever the prices say. Quarter by quarter, that rate on a district page, such as SE23 in Lewisham, is the auction market's own weather report. Watch it move before the sold-price index does; auction buyers price the present, and the registry records it months later.

Discount to value, done properly

The number people actually want is the discount: what did the lot make against what the property is worth? That needs a value for the same property, and MarketCode has one for most homes with a floor area on record. The auction discount is the ratio of hammer price to the valuation of the same property, aggregated by district and period.

Two caveats travel with it. The ratio is only a discount where the sale and the valuation are close in time; every valuation shares one snapshot date, so an old lot carries years of market movement in the ratio as well as any discount, and the response breaks it out by year for that reason. And it is computed only on lots with an achieved price, so it inherits the coverage limit above.

Distress, seen from the results

A lot that fails to sell once was probably guided wrong. A lot that has failed twice or three times, and is now guided below its estimated value, is something else. The distressed assets screen finds exactly that pattern by district: repeat failure at auction, guide below value. It is the most specific distress signal in the warehouse, because it is built from outcomes rather than from a listing's wording.

What the records do not carry

Bedrooms and property type come from the matched property record, not the catalogue, which populates type on a small minority of lots and tenure on none. Five auction houses are covered: Allsop back to 1999, Savills, Acuitus, Barnett Ross and Agents Property Auction. Acuitus is the one that publishes yield beside the price, so filter to it when yield is the question. The auction houses source page lists what each publishes.

Do it today

Ask your assistant, with MarketCode connected: "What was the sale rate at auction in SE6 over the last eight quarters, and are guide and achieved comparable in any of them?" The answer will carry the counts and the flag. Then ask for the distressed lots in the district, and you have a shortlist a portal could not have produced.