The Labour Day holiday provided a break from the spring ritual of buying and selling property for most Sydneysiders. There were fewer than 400 auctions – though there were close to 1000 last Saturday and even more expected next weekend.

But for Chinese buyers, this was precisely the weekend to snap up property. Like all things golden, the Golden Week holiday in China – the first week of October – is considered a lucky time to buy.

That’s why a young honeymooning couple, who had flown in from Beijing, were so keen on a five-bedroom house at 61 Threlfall Street, Eastwood on Saturday.

The couple aren’t Australian citizens, but because it was brand new, businessman Fan Yng, 29, and Shan Xu, 28, who works in a bank, were still eligible to buy ahead of hopefully migrating here.

“People are too rich, they have too much money to spend,” their cousin, Tony Zhang, who already lives in Sydney, joked.

How would they migrate? They could get a job, work in a restaurant, even invest $5 million and gain residency via a Significant Investment visa.

The Australian-Chinese vendor of the property had bought the old red-brick three-bedroom house on April 8 two years ago – considered a lucky date for Chinese people – for $883,000, then knocked it down and built a lucky house.

“It’s on the high side of the street, the circular driveway creates a grand sense of arrival that the Chinese people really like, and a vertical privacy screen at the entrance stops the money and wealth going out the door,” said the home’s architect, Li Wang.

More than 90 groups had inspected the home and they all looked to have come along for the auction. A coffee van was doing a roaring trade. First National agent David Middleton had handed out 15 contracts during the campaign. Eight people registered to bid and five participated.

Fan Yng was handed a bouquet of flowers for his opening bid of $2.3 million. But no sooner had he been congratulated than someone else offered $50,000 more. He bounced back with $2.5 million, supposedly their limit. Their final offer was $2.6 million.

Local upgraders, the Ho family, who lived around the corner, ended up with it for $2,682,000, which the vendors were happy with. And the honeymooners from Beijing? “A little bit upset,” said Mr Zhang, but “you can see there were a lot of people here, some hard competition, they’ll find another one.”

Then they were off to Epping to look at another house.

In other auctions, a dilapidated three-bedroom cottage in one of Pagewood’s best streets sold for $248,000 over reserve on Saturday. A Kingsford family paid $1,648,000 for the house on 470 square metres at 34 Wark Avenue. They plan to lease it before renovating or rebuilding it to live in.

“Taking this one out of the equation, the market has come off a bit,” said Joshua Karam of Raine & Horne Maroubra.

The Bank of Mum and Dad swung into action in Newtown where both the buyer and underbidder were parents aiming to buy their adult children a stake in the popular inner west suburb. They competed to buy the renovated two-bedroom terrace at 38 Queen Street for their adult children. The mother from Camden bought it for $1,535,000 for her daughter.

The highest-priced property for the day was 17 Berrillee Street in Turramurra which sold under the hammer for $4.22 million, meeting its reserve price.

The five-bedroom house on 1500 square metres sold to a young family from the Homebush area who competed against one other bidder, an upper north shore local.

Selling agent David Bokor of LJ Hooker Pymble said the property drew interest from families looking to be close to private schools on the upper north shore.

With 253 of the 373 results in by Saturday evening, Domain Group put the auction clearance rate at 69.9 per cent, just a fraction better than last weekend’s 69.6 per cent. “We’ve now had two weekends in a row failing to break a 70 per cent clearance rate,” Domain Group senior economist, Dr Andrew Wilson, said. “It was a holiday weekend, but the big test comes next weekend with over 1000 auctions.”