Spent a Saturday hopping between auctions in the Eastern Suburbs last week. Couldn’t help noticing how different the process looks compared to even five years ago.

The basics remain—crowd, auctioneer, dramatic bidding. But everything around it has shifted.

The Live Streaming Baseline

Live streaming auctions is now table stakes. Every major agency offers it. Most buyers expect it.

What’s interesting is how it’s changed bidder behaviour. You’ve got people watching from interstate who jump in via phone bids at the last moment. Overseas buyers participating in real-time. Family members watching together but from different locations.

The technology itself isn’t remarkable anymore—most agencies use Gavl or similar platforms. What matters is execution: camera angles, audio quality, clear display of current bid and increments.

I watched one auction where the stream kept buffering at crucial moments. The frustration from online viewers was palpable. Small technical failures have outsized impact when tens of thousands of dollars hang on each bid increment.

Registration Has Gone Digital

The old process: arrive early, fill out paper form, show ID to registration desk, get paddle.

Now: pre-register online days before, verify identity through digital ID check, get a unique bidder code. On the day, check in via app or QR code.

It’s faster for buyers and better for agents. You know who’s registered before auction day. You can follow up with pre-qualified buyers who didn’t bid. The data flows straight into your CRM.

REA Group has been pushing digital registration tools across their platform. Domain offers similar capabilities.

Real-Time Market Data During Campaigns

This is where it gets genuinely useful. Agents now have dashboards showing campaign performance in real-time:

• Website listing views trending up or down
• Enquiry numbers versus comparable properties
• Open home attendance patterns
• Online engagement metrics by buyer segment

A Mosman agent told me she adjusts vendor expectations mid-campaign based on these signals. Low online engagement often predicts auction outcomes more reliably than open home attendance.

PropTrack and CoreLogic provide much of this data integration for agencies.

AI-Assisted Pricing Guidance

This remains controversial, but it’s happening.

Several agencies now use AI tools that analyse comparable sales, market conditions, and property features to suggest price ranges. Not as the final word—that’s still human judgment—but as an input to the conversation.

The better implementations help agents prepare for vendor discussions with data rather than just intuition. The worse ones spit out numbers that don’t account for property-specific factors.

I’ve seen agents use AI consultants Melbourne specialists to build custom valuation models. Whether that’s worth the investment depends on volume and how much the accuracy improvement matters for your vendor relationships.

Post-Auction Follow-Up Automation

Here’s where technology arguably has the biggest impact on agent productivity.

After an auction, there’s a cascade of follow-ups needed:

• Underbidders who might suit other properties
• Vendor of passed-in property needing next steps
• Attendees who registered but didn’t bid
• People who enquired but didn’t attend

Good CRM systems trigger these automatically. The agent records the result, and personalised emails deploy based on each contact’s status.

Is it impersonal? A bit. Does it ensure no opportunity falls through the cracks? Absolutely.

What Hasn’t Changed

For all the technology, the fundamentals remain the same.

Buyers still want to touch the walls and open the cupboards. Reading the room during an auction still matters. Knowing when to slow down versus push through still requires human intuition.

The agents who thrive aren’t necessarily the most technologically sophisticated. They’re the ones who use technology to handle the repetitive stuff while focusing their attention on the high-value human moments.

Where It’s Heading

Expect digital bidding to become more common—not just phone bids relayed by staff, but direct online participation with the same status as in-person bidders. The regulatory framework is still catching up, but the technology is ready.

Expect better integration between auction platforms and settlement systems. Currently there’s still manual data entry after the hammer falls. That gap will close.

And expect more sophisticated buyer qualification. Agencies will know more about registered bidders—pre-approval status, property search history, genuine intent signals—before auction day.

The traditional Sydney auction isn’t disappearing. It’s being wrapped in technology that makes it faster, more accessible, and more data-rich. Adapting to that reality is part of staying competitive.