Allsop sale lifts market gloom

On the day that the Bank of England cut the base rate by a quarter per cent to 5.5%, Allsop achieved an 83% success rate at its sale.

Overall, the sale raised £62.7m, with an average lot size of £704,000. This is compared to £74.3m at October's sale, an average lot size of £565,000.

At the equivalent sale last year, Allsop achieved a success rate of 87%, raising £127m.

Investor appetite

Auctioneer Duncan Moir said he thought that Allsop's result showed that the appetite for property still existed amongst private investors, so long as pricing reflected how the market has changed since the summer.

'I think 83% against a market average of about 65% shows that there is not a problem with liquidity, there is a problem with pricing,' he said.

'What people forget in a market like this is that there is appetite there so long as the pricing is right. We think we got it right, and a success rate of above 80% where others have not managed to sustain that bears this out.'

Moir said lots priced below £4m were still selling very well, and that the fundamentals had not changed since the company's October sale, when the success rate was 80%.

The all-retail yield for the sale 5.4%, and the yield for Benchmark bank sale and leaseback lots was below 5%, a downward movement from the October sale.