Domain Data Scraping

The method of sale is the primary field, not the price

Australian residential property is frequently sold at auction, particularly in the major metropolitan markets. For those listings:

• There may be no price at all. "Contact agent" or "auction" is the whole price field.
• Where a guide exists it is a range, and the range is a marketing decision rather than a valuation.
• The guide can move during the campaign, which is itself a signal.
• The final price is only known after the auction, and only if it sold.

sale_method is the primary field — auction, private treaty, expression of interest, tender. We record price_guide_low, price_guide_high and price_guide_text separately, and we never collapse a guide range into a single figure, because the midpoint of a marketing range is not a price anybody quoted.

Guide movement is a real signal

Where a guide is revised during a campaign, we record each revision with its timestamp. A guide rising or falling before auction day says something about the campaign that the final result alone does not.

Three auction outcomes, and why two of them are frequently conflated

After an auction a property is sold, passed in, or withdrawn. Those are different events.

• Sold — it met the reserve and transacted at auction.
• Passed in — bidding did not meet the reserve. The property is usually still for sale, frequently by negotiation, and may sell days later at a different price.
• Withdrawn — the auction did not proceed.

A dataset that records only sold-or-not loses the middle case, which is the most informative one about where bidding actually stopped.

We record auction_outcome with all three states, plus highest_bid where published on a pass-in, and subsequent_sale_price where a later sale is subsequently published against the same listing.

What we do not compute

Clearance rate. It is widely reported and it is computed on varying bases — which auctions are counted, how late results are collected, whether pass-ins that sell later are reclassified. Two published clearance rates for the same weekend frequently differ.

We deliver the underlying outcomes with timestamps so you can compute it on a basis you can state. We do not publish a number whose definition we would have had to choose for you.

What is published after the fact, and what is not

Sold prices

Where a sold price is published against a listing we capture it, with price_published flagged. Not all sales publish a price, and the share that does varies by state and by agency practice.

sold_price_visible_share ships per batch, because a market analysis built on published sold prices is built on a self-selecting subset — and the selection is not random.

What we do not collect

• Vendor or buyer identity. Not collected in any market.
• Individual agent details. Agency name is a commercial entity; the agent is a person.
• Official transfer records. Those come from state land registries and are a separate source with different coverage and lag.

The last one is worth being clear about: a portal sold price is what was published by an agency. A land registry transfer is the transaction record. They are different sources and they do not always agree.