You sign up, pick five Sydney auctions every week, type a dollar number for each, and find out Sunday morning how close you got. That’s the whole game. Everything below is the detail.
Sydney has hundreds of auctions every Saturday — often more than 1,000 in peak selling season. We hand-pick 20 of them as the week’s curated slate and open it Sunday evening, six days ahead. You read the cards, choose 5, and type what you reckon each one will sell for. Saturday morning the picks lock. Saturday and Sunday they settle. The closer you got to the actual sale price, the more points you score.
You’re not stuck with the curated 20 either — flip a toggle on the picks page to browse the full Sydney auction set and predict on any of them. The curated slate is a recommended starting point, not a hard limit; all picks score the same way.
It’s free. There’s no entry fee, no cash prizes, no peer-to-peer wagering. We sit outside Australian gambling regulation by construction — and the words we use here (predict, reckon, call it) reflect that.
We curate them from Domain’s upcoming-Saturday schedule. Mix of suburbs, mix of price ranges, a couple of trophy listings, two to four with no published guide. The week’s form guide, six days ahead. The full tracked set is one toggle away if you want to predict on something off the curated slate — all picks score equally.
Read the cards. Pick the ones you have a feel for. For each: type a dollar amount (e.g. $1,820,000) and pick a Confidence level — Low, Medium, or High. Your picks auto-save as you go. There’s no “submit” button at the bottom.
The window closes server-side. From this moment your picks are read-only, the cards on /locked show what you committed to.
Most properties go under the hammer between 9:30 am and 1 pm. We sweep Domain’s public results page at 11 am, 7 pm, and Sunday morning. Each sale price is compared to your prediction; the closer you were, the more points you score.
You’ll get an email with your week’s total. Some auctions take longer to resolve — the ones that pass in or sell with the price withheld. Those settle over the following weeks; bonus picks credit forward when they don’t.
One worked example. A property sells for $1,600,000. You called $1,620,000with High confidence on a guided auction. That’s 1.25% off → 11.5 points. Closer would have scored more; further would have scored less; outside ±15% you score zero — the cliff is sharp on purpose.
Confidence multiplies your win and your loss (Low 0.5×, Med 1.0×, High 1.25×) — High on auctions you’ve researched hard, Low on ones you barely know. Auctions with no published guide are 1.5× points, since the read is genuinely harder. Theoretical max on a single pick is 18.75; a strong Saturday lands in the 30s overall.
For the actual formula, the multiplier table, and the boundary maths, see /methodology §1.
Most picks settle Saturday night when Domain publishes the results. The rest take longer: a property might pass in (resolves against the private sale within 30 days), sell with the price withheld (resolves against NSW Valuer-General data 6–12 weeks later), or get withdrawn / sold before the auction even runs (voided through no fault of yours, bonus pick credited to next week).
Bonus picks compound — a four-voided week credits four bonus picks the following Sunday, so you choose nine instead of five on the next slate. The full breakdown of all five states (the windows, the void rules, what triggers a bonus credit) is at /methodology §2.
Your calibration tier is a measure of your accuracy over your last three months of resolved picks. ELI5: average how far off you were each time, in percent. Lower is better.
Five tiers, ladder from bottom to top: Unrated (fewer than 20 resolved picks, or far enough off that the system isn’t ready to score you), Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Most players land in Bronze first, climb through Silver and Gold as their research compounds, and a small number reach Platinum — specialist territory by design.
Tier shows up next to your name on the leaderboard, on your profile, and as a multiplier when your picks contribute to the crowd’s published median. Higher tier means your picks count more. The exact MAPE bands and the multiplier each tier carries are at /methodology §3.
More questions — can I change my prediction, can I see the crowd’s pre-auction, what happens if I miss a week — are answered on /faq.
One email, one click. Two minutes to your first five picks.