The ACT's auction clearance rates have dropped 30 percentage points since the start of the year, but experts in the industry are divided on whether it is any cause for alarm.
Ray White's Kelsey Tracey said the situation was not yet dire - and unlikely to become so.
"Anything over 40 per cent is actually just a really healthy market," Ms Tracey said.
"As Canberrans, we've probably just grown very used to the frenzied clearance rates because the market obviously went a little bit bonkers there for a while. It's just stabilised more than anything."
According to Cotality, the ACT's clearance rate started the year at 64.9 per cent, and hit its lowest point in mid-June when just 36.8 per cent of auctions resulted in a sale.
The number has crept up slightly since then, sitting at 41.3 per cent for a fortnight, before finally clearing the 50 per cent mark in the first week of July.
The combined clearance rate in the capital cities has been sitting under 50 per cent for six weeks.
Ms Tracey, however, said she would continue to recommend auctions to sellers. Houses that sold at auction sat on the market for about 30 days, she said, about half the time for those sold through private treaty.
"It still remains a preferred method of sale. I don't think that buyers and sellers should be scared of the clearance rate being around 40 per cent," she said.
"There's still a lot of genuine buyers in the market, they're just making more informed decisions."
There's still a lot of genuine buyers in the market, they're just making more informed decisions.
Houses under the $1 million mark are still moving quickly, and Ms Tracey said first home buyers were the main demographic showing up to auctions in the ACT.
"Auction clearance rates - they're really just one key indicator in the market. To rely heavily on auction clearance rates to make a decision on whether it's the right time for you to sell, I don't know that making an informed decision.
"We have a very transient population here. There's always people coming, going, there's always going to be people downsizing."
Recent data from Cotality indicates that first home buyers are taking the time to consider their options before committing to a purchase.
Antony Damiano, from Bastion Real Estate, said as a result auctions were becoming patchy in the ACT, and that the clearance rate could be much lower than suggested.
"It feels like the effective rate is more like 20 or 30 per cent," he said.
He said first home buyers should think of property as a long-term investment, rather than holding off in an attempt to buy at the bottom of the cycle. "Property is always going to go up forever. People need to just get out of that short-term analysis paralysis," he said.
Mr Damiano also encouraged home buyers to consider auctions as a more transparent way of buying a home.
"Unfortunately, with private treaty, we can't disclose what other buyers' offers are, because then what happens is you just chuck a couple of hundred bucks on top," he said.
"If clearance rates continue to fall, agents will stop doing auctions accordingly and we're going to have this cyclical thing where buyers are going to get fed up with private treaty again, because there's no transparency. "You don't know what the other offers are, your offers are subject to terms, you can get gazumped a lot easier."
