Softening house market?

I've seen a few properties come back on the market after they went Sale Agreed.

Turn key, new A-rated and B-rated properties tend to go for above asking though, and houses in the better suburbs the same. But not all houses are snapped up however.

It also seems to ignore that you can have 2 literally identical houses - one listed at 400k, the other at 450k and yet if they both sell for 500k people seem to only lose their minds about the one listed for 400...

Asking prices are borderline irrelevant, I noticed myself when searching that plenty of EAs would list a property a price bracket too low, I'm guessing so that it would appear in more daft/myhome searches.

Well, numbers on Daft.ie and Myhome.ie are trending up. As always if there is more supply, there is more choice for buyers which means they can be more discernable when it comes to bidding.

Sure, but this is a asking-price-too-low problem, not a sale-price-too-high problem which is the conclusion everyone seems to leap to.

All the same, my experience over the years is that the asking prices were their expectation

Really there was few properties where asking prices were exceeded, and yes there are two EAs in my area who deliberately price low.

But acid test - if you were a vendor and you got 10k under asking - would you accept?

If that is the highest offer and you need to get rid of the property = yes

But I also look at the PPR..and generally I give EAs a hard time about prices, I think the majority will not put a lower than average price, unless there is work to be done etc. I think it is generally accepted that the asking price will be the average price.

But if the asking price is 100k below than recent sales, bid away.

If the selling price is 100k over average.....

I actually bid on 2 properties recently that didn't reach asking, they were priced too high even against recent sale, I withdrew my bids on one when a higher bid was invented (but still the vendor apartently preferred to sell to me if I matched the offer....nice of them when I don't know them...)

Well, personally, I would never spend 50k on a brand new car for exactly this reason! But I see what you mean - why is housing the only purchase where we expect to be able to get back all the money we’ve spent?

I also understand your point that in the long term people are rarely worse off buying (though people buying now are not on trackers) but in the short term a severe drop after you buy can cause a lot of difficulty. Remember all the stories about families stuck in tiny apartments due to being in negative equity after the crash? Or people who needed to move for work but couldn’t sell and so ended up paying a mortgage and rent (rental income wouldn’t cover mortgage and mortgage wasn’t even tax deductible at that time)? Sure, most of them came out in in the end but there were some very stressful years in there.

They get caught up in the bidding frenzy, lose the run of themselves and then find they cant secure the finances or extra borrowings resulting in the house been returned to the market.

And how many bidders were active above 500k, just the two?

It's not quite as interesting as the headline sounds - mostly about what's going on in the Chinese property market, with useful level of detail, but then when it comes to relating it to the Irish market in 2022, just says 'prices here are very high', with not such an obvious argument that 'and therefore we'll have a crash on the scale of China'.

Separately, I see a recent forecast that prices in the UK could contract 7% over two years. Ouch if the same thing happens here, but still worth me buying given what I'd spend on rent in 2 years... (Plus 2 years from now = higher interest rates, I'll be two years older and I work in the travel sector so getting a mortgage could be even more challening.) I'm still aiming to buy now, though feeling increasingly nervous about it all. Definitely glad I'm looking at buying now not 6 months ago when things were really nuts, though.

I see a local auctioneer reporting a 20% increase in stock year on year in Wexford. Maybe a sign of a slowdown in more rural areas?