Carrington Clarke

And I think those things coming together

are the reasons we are starting to see this property market turn.

Yeah.

And an auction is what people kind of term an efficient way of price discovery.

Like how much are people actually willing to pay?

It's normally a very efficient thing and very good for a seller at a time when the market is hot.

But at the moment, the advice seems to be increasingly if you've got a buyer and they're basically at the price that you are willing to sell for, then maybe lock that down because they're finding when you are getting to the auction, perhaps people get cold feet or things might have even changed by that stage when it comes to the mood of the market or what they're hearing about what's coming

out of the Middle East, for example.

So there does seem to have been a pretty significant change.

Now, obviously, all these predictions, including what the money markets say about interest rates and what the economists say about interest rates, they can be wrong.

But there does seem to have been, at least at this point, consensus around this May meeting.

It does get a little bit more opaque, unclear as we go further in the year, understandably, because the longer you go out, the less information we have about what the circumstances are going to be at that point.

It's literally where people are putting their money when it comes to their bets on where interest rates are going to be.

The importance of messaging

should never be understated.

They want markets to be calm.

They want people to feel good about the state of the economy, but also to try to kind of gently guide them along a particular path.

At the moment, they're trying to guide people down a slightly less inflationary path, which is why they're hiking interest rates, but they also don't want people

to panic.

And so I think if they do something that goes completely against consensus, then that can, as you say, shock the markets.