A first home buyer couple paid $850,000 for an Artarmon apartment on Saturday which they had not seen before the day of the auction, picking it up for less than the $925,000 the sellers had paid for the home.

The two-bedroom home with cheery feature walls and no parking at 1/36 Hampden Road last traded in 2023 and this time sold for $75,000 less.

The property was one of 520 scheduled to go to auction in Sydney last week. By Saturday evening, Domain Group recorded a preliminary auction clearance rate of 50 per cent from 292 reported results throughout the week, while 94 auctions were withdrawn. Withdrawn auctions are counted as unsold properties when calculating the clearance rate.

The sleek Artarmon unit with painted feature walls throughout had a guide of $800,000.

It drew three registrations, all first home buyers. Two parties saw the property for the first time on the same day.

Two first home buyers actively bid. Bidding opened at $775,000 and went up in $10,000 and $5000 increments until it met its $850,000 reserve where it sold to a young couple from Turramurra.

The couple were buying their first home together and had not seen it before the day of the auction.

BresicWhitney’s Stephen O’Sullivan said, “It’s a walk-in apartment. There’s nothing to do.”

“Normally around that price point, you’re not getting nicely presented bathrooms … They’re all going to require renovation, where this doesn’t at all,” he said.

He said a low maintenance Art Deco buildings such as this are “traditionally good rental properties,” but investors are “just cautious in this current environment.”

The vendors are upsizing to Castle Hill.

In Eastwood, a three-bedroom apartment at 405/8 Avondale Way, with a guide of $990,000 sold to a buyer upsizing from a two-bedroom in the same suburb for $1.05 million.

McGrath’s Grace Zhang said the buyer considered doing a pre-auction offer but then waited to see what would happen at auction. The vendor knew there was at least one interested buyer.

The vendor had hopes as high as $1.1 million due to a $1.08 million sale in the building six months ago.

The one registered bidder negotiated their best offer as $1.05 million over a 30-minute process while people waited in the living room to see what would happen. The vendor accepted the offer, reducing their reserve of $1.08 million by $30,000 to sell.

“We think it’s a changing market for sure. It’s a lot of uncertainty, but we actually think it’s a good market because we still have buyers,” Zhang said.

“For a lot of property, we come with at least one buyer interested, and they are … ready to buy.”

The upsizing local buyer will now list their two-bedroom apartment to sell.

The vendor no longer lived at the address and was renting it out. They had purchased it for $888,000 in 2015, records show.

AMP’s chief economist Dr Shane Oliver said Domain’s clearance rate of 50 per cent for Sydney is “fairly soft.”

“The sales levels are remaining very depressed, and the listings are also depressed. So this week a year ago we had 726 listings, whereas the website says there were 520.”

Oliver said listings are well down on where they were a year ago.

“That I think reflects vendors deciding to wait and see if they can get a better price at some point down the track.”

“It doesn’t normally get much weaker than that. So we could be bouncing along the bottom of the range. If you look at the 20-year range.”