Public, property auctions could bring transparency, fairness, and a dose of honesty to the city’s overheated housing market.
It’s a crisp Saturday morning in Halifax. You have your coffee in hand, and instead of endlessly refreshing Realtor.ca, you’re standing in front of a house, or sitting on your couch, watching bids roll in live.
“Do I hear $712,000? $720,000? $725,000 from the couple in the fleece vests? Going once, going twice… sold!”
Ridiculous? Maybe not.
In parts of Australia, it is very common to sell houses this way; through public property auctions, where buyers compete in the open. It’s loud, fast, nerve-wracking, and, some might argue, fairer.
As Halifax continues to wrestle with housing affordability, market opacity, and buyer fatigue, maybe it’s time to ask: could we borrow a page from the New South Wales playbook?
The Bidding Wars We Already Have
Honestly, Halifax is already holding informal auctions. We just call them “bidding wars.”
You find a house listed for $499,000. You offer $525,000, cross your fingers, and pray you’re not the one offering $60,000 more than the next person. The process feels like a blindfolded sprint; it’s emotional, confusing, and occasionally absurd.
Buyers are frustrated. Sellers are stressed. And policymakers can’t see what’s actually happening because all the data hides behind closed doors.
A public auction system, like the one Australia, could change a few things. Every bid would be visible. The true market value would emerge in real time. The process would be over in hours (maybe days).
It sounds radical for Halifax. But in a market that is already halfway there (and losing goodwill fast), transparency might be exactly what the doctor ordered.
How It Could Work
Under this system, home sales would move from the opaque “best offer by 4 p.m.” model to an open auction overseen by provincial regulators and municipal planning departments.
Buyers would pre-qualify for financing, register to bid, and compete openly (in person or online) for listed properties.
To make sure the process supports fairness rather than frenzy, the rules could include:
- End-user prioritization: Auctions in designated areas could restrict participation to owner-occupiers or first-time buyers. (A good thing for the buyer perhaps, but for the seller – not so much).
- Regulated oversight: Provincial housing bodies would ensure fair play, preventing collusion or fake bids.
- Municipal integration: HRM could designate “auction zones” possibly in new subdivisions or redevelopment areas where transparency supports planning goals.
It’s housing policy meets reality TV. Except this time, the drama might actually help.
Why Halifax Might Benefit
1. Transparency and Trust
In today’s Halifax market, buyers often make blind offers on homes they’ve seen for 10 minutes. They never know what others offered, or how close they came. That secrecy breeds suspicion.
Auctions fix that. Everyone sees what’s on the table. Prices reflect genuine market demand, not behind-the-scenes negotiations.
Transparency has a way of making markets behave.
2. Better Market Intelligence
For planners, economists, and analysts (hi, that’s us), public auctions create an incredible side benefit: data.
Every sale becomes a freely accessible transparent datapoint, showing how much buyers value different neighborhoods, housing types, and features. HRM’s planners could use this to refine zoning, density targets, and infrastructure plans.
It’s not just about fairness; it’s about better evidence.
3. Cooler Heads in Hot Markets
Auctions might actually calm overheated markets.
In closed bidding systems, buyers compete in the dark, often overcompensating just to “win.” But in an open auction, they see where the price is heading and can make rational (or at least slightly less irrational) decisions.
It’s one thing to offer $70,000 over asking in a panic. It’s another to do it in front of fifty people watching.
4. Tailored for Halifax’s Housing Goals
There could be auction pilots in areas HRM wants to encourage homeownership in like within new mixed-use communities or along the commuter rail corridor. Rules could prioritize local residents, limit investors, and even reinvest auction proceeds into affordability programs.
For a city juggling growth, planning, and equity, auctions could be a surprising ally.
The Big Caveats
Before anyone orders the gavel, let me just say that this isn’t an easy fix.
1. Auctions Can Be Intense
Anyone who’s watched an Australian auction knows it’s not for the faint of heart. Adrenaline spikes, egos clash, and people get caught up in the moment.
In Halifax, a city where I have found that polite hesitation is practically a civic value, the emotional intensity might scare some buyers away.
2. Not Everyone Can Play
Auctions usually require pre-approved financing and a deposit on the spot. That’s fine for investors or cash-ready buyers, but it could lock out younger households or first-timers with slower financing timelines.
Without careful safeguards, public auctions could actually widen inequities instead of fixing them.
3. Admin Overhead and Red Tape
Creating a regulated, fair, municipality/province-wide auction framework would be bureaucratically messy. Who enforces the rules? Who trains auctioneers? How are disputes resolved?
And how do we ensure this doesn’t become yet another system that benefits those already positioned to win?
4. The Case for the Middleman
Before we auction off the old ways entirely, it’s worth remembering what real estate agents actually add to the process.
A good agent doesn’t just unlock doors — they interpret markets, calm nerves, and guide buyers and sellers through what is often the biggest financial decision of their lives. They catch issues before they explode, translate dense paperwork into plain English, and sometimes even talk people out of making bad decisions.
Agents also bring local intelligence that no online auction can replicate: which streets flood after a hard rain, which builders have reliable track records, and which listings are priced with a wink.
In short, they bring the human context to what is otherwise a spreadsheet exercise. Transparency is valuable, but so is trust — and great agents have spent years earning it.
5. Vendor’s Perspective
There are two sides to a real estate transaction. Many of the aforementioned arguments in favor of an auction-style system benefit purchasers. But what if you’re the vendor? Sure, an auction might prevent someone from bidding $60,000 higher than the next person—but if you’re the vendor, that’s exactly what you want!
And what about the previously mentioned measures, such as restricting auctions to purchasers who will actually occupy the home? Excluding investors who intend to rent the property or convert it to an Airbnb would certainly advance the goal of promoting owner-occupancy. From the vendor’s standpoint, however, the objective is to attract the widest possible pool of bidders to maximize sale proceeds—and restrictions on eligible buyers would inevitably diminish the property’s market value.
The Halifax Way Forward
So, how do we even begin?
We test. Carefully. If we want to.
HRM could start with a pilot platform; municipally managed online marketplace that allows private homeowners to list and sell their properties directly, under a standardized framework designed to maximize fairness, transparency, and accessibility.
If successful, this model could gradually expand. It wouldn’t replace private real estate transactions, but coexist as an alternative channel for sellers who value speed, clarity, and equal access to buyers.
Even a handful of well-designed trials could give us insight into whether this model makes sense for Halifax’s unique market dynamics.
A Culture Shift Waiting to Happen
The biggest hurdle may not be regulation or logistics; I think it’s culture.
Canadians are used to whispering their best offer to their agent. The thought of shouting it across a lawn on Quinpool Road, or having every competing bidder watch your offer rise in real time online, feels, well… un-Canadian. Maybe even un-North American.
Yet that’s exactly how homes change hands in cities like Sydney, both in person and online. Loud, transparent, and impossible to hide behind. Just check this website out: https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/in-sydney,+nsw+2000/auction-times-1
And that’s exactly why it might work.
Our current system thrives on mystery, but mystery is rarely good for affordability. The more buyers and sellers see what’s really happening, the harder it becomes for the market to detach from reality.
Maybe it’s time for Halifax to stop treating housing as a polite game of telephone and start treating it as what it is: a public, high-stakes marketplace that deserves sunlight.
The Gavel or the Guesswork
Public auctions won’t magically fix housing affordability. They won’t build new supply, or stop rents from rising, or make three-bedroom homes in the South End suddenly affordable.
But they would make the system more transparent, and grounded in reality; two things our market could use more of. And at a time when buying a house in Halifax can feel like a cross between a poker game and a prayer, maybe a bit of honesty isn’t such a bad thing.
Jigme Choerab is manager of our Economic Intelligence Unit. For more information about how you can benefit from the unique expertise of our Planning & Economic Intelligence team, contact Jigme at (902) 429-1811 or .