ALMOST 2000 people have downloaded the catalogue for Australia’s first AuctionsPlus interfaced and live-streamed property auction taking place later today.

The extraordinary result indicates that the industry’s online marketing platform has application far beyond its traditional roots selling cattle and sheep.

As highlighted in this earlier article on Sheep Central, a simultaneously interfaced auction, combining a traditional ‘live’ auction venue in South Australia with an AuctionsPlus online audience across Australia, will be held for the first time.

Keith district grazing and cropping property Cooinda, being offered through Ruralco’s Southern Australian Livestock rural property business, SAL Real Estate, will be the first to pioneer the process.

The physical sale is taking place at the Keith Football Clubrooms today at 1pm, South Australian time (1.30pm Sydney time, 12.30pm Qld time).

Click here to register to watch the sale, live-streamed via AuctionsPlus, direct from the auction venue. Beef Central will provide details for post-auction recorded viewing, if it can be provided by AuctionsPlus later today.

Cooinda is a well-regarded local Keith holding comprising 378ha of quality grazing and farming land together with a 304,000kl water allocation, three equipped flood irrigation bores, a large extensively-renovated home and outstanding sheds and yards. While it has proven to be well-suited to running well-known Border Leicester, Hampshire Downs and Poll Dorset stud sheep flocks, the block is in an area long-recognised as the leading irrigated lucerne seed-producing district in the country.

Speaking to Beef Central earlier, AuctionsPlus CEO Anna Speer said rural property was not a segment that AuctionsPlus had been ‘actively pursuing’, but the process had been initiated by agents already engaged with the platform via livestock sales.

“We would have fielded 10 or 15 phone calls from people over the past month, interested in exploring the use of AuctionsPlus for property marketing and auction purposes,” she said.

“We put that down, in part, to the awareness of the strength in AuctionsPlus’s livestock sales recently, creating its own interest in using the platform in other, non-traditional ways.”

“Not only is it creating greater exposure for the property prior to the auction, it is good for the agency’s own branding. I’d expect to see people logging into the sale later today from everywhere, and if they target the right channels, they could well have people from China logging-in for a look,” she said.

Almost regardless of whether online bids are actually posted in today’s Cooinda auction, the process has exposed the property to an audience much larger than normal, as evidenced by the rate of access to the online catalogue listing.