Any law/regulation broken here???

Muff Richardson

Go easy on my here as my knowledge of equity law real estate regulations is very limited,
Here’s the situation and I won’t name the specific property or agents, a couple with cash were interested in purchasing a property so they contacted the realtor and said they would be interested in making a bid. They went about this quite naïvely anfd were asked what their maximum bid would be as there was already bids in and he would have to see if they could match it, (the asking was 550k)…the couple said they were prepared to go up to 590k, the realtor subsequently said that this had gone up to 620k already and enquired if they could go any better. They said no and that this was there maximum and thanked the realtor and that was that….a few hours pass and the phone rings late on the evening of bank holiday weekend, realtor said “great news” that he had a good chat with the seller and that seeing as they were prepared to pay cash they would accept the 590k bid from them instead of the 620k…smelt like bullsh*t to me from this much but as I said they were quite naïve in their dealing and they accepted the deal.

Over the weekend something came up which I won’t get into but they decided to withdraw the offer which was unrelated to the scepticism of the deal being struck.
They ring the realtor on Monday and explain they unfortunately have to withdraw offer and after a small amount of pressure from the realtor to reconsider they part ways.


3 days later said house is for sale and is on the site and asking has dropped from 550k to 500k.


I don’t think there is any question that the phantom bids of up to 620k never existed and he was looking to milk them dry. Why would you drop the price like that if there was such a level of interest and bids in way above asking…My question is does anybody know is this practice legal and above board? I know its not honest or ethical but has any law been broken or a breach of some kind of regulation??? It went from relief to anger with them and we all know what a mess things are here with property, its practice like this and realtors like this that are causing spikes and bogus market values. Can they be reported?

Carbon125

Ghost bidding is attempted fraud. The couple can complain to the Property Services Regulatory Authority and ask for the realtor's licence to be revoked:

npsra.ie/website/npsra/npsraweb.nsf/page/whatwedo-investigation-en

BeatNikDub

They must have official logs of all bids to include the details (including postal address to prove a real person) and the time taken of the bid. Also it must be taken by a licensed agent.
The regulator can and should investigate this!