Last year saw a spike in auctions in Ballarat, with Ray White Ballarat conducting a record 40 auctions for 2016 – more than twice any other realtor.

A total 113 auctions were held in Ballarat.

“Ballarat’s has probably been a more conservative market in the past but particularly last year we started doing more auctions and other agents started doing more auctions,” Ray White Ballarat director Phillip Lee said. 

“There’s a perception that auctions don’t work in Ballarat but they do, there’s an art to it.”

Ray White Ballarat’s three in-room nighttime auctions last year saw a turn out of between 60 and 150 attend each auction, Mr Lee said. 

Mr Lee said the influence of Melbourne – the “auction capital” – was spurring competition at Ballarat auctions. 

The in-room auctions had a clearance rate of 50 per cent, with other properties selling shortly after.

On average auctioned properties sold up to twice as fast as homes sold by private treaty, he said. 

“We’ve found people are bidding on properties they didn’t come to buy, we’ve had investors bidding on multiple properties on the night.

“Melbourne buyers have been very strong at our in room auctions and bidding for them is second nature.”

Ballarat sellers are coming around to the transparency of an auction over the privacy of a traditional sale, Harcourts Ballarat general manager Peter Ludbrook said.

“I think we’ve seen an increasing acceptance of the auction process as a viable alternative to the traditional private treaty sale that Ballarat has normally had inflicted upon it,” Mr Ludbrook said.

“It’s up to us as an industry to educate the benefits of the auction process, partly Ballarat being a smaller town there’s perhaps some resistance to auctions to buyers because of the lack of privacy it affords.”