Bidding race for property

no way to find out for sure, set your upper limit and be prepared to walk away

Welcome to the club of buying houses. You will encounter this at every house you view, they all have these hidden buyers prepared to bid against you the moment you wish to put a bid in 🤣. I encounter the same.

Don't agents change their game, someone should tell them so.

Do your own valuation of the property, and maximum you want to bid on, put the bid in and be prepared to walk away. Don't invest yourself emotionally as this is what agents pray on.

. I have proof. Rang the office.

?? Not only did they make up a bid but they confessed to it?

No offence but...

There's a good reason why estate agents come low down the scale when it comes to public trust. Same sort of guff when we were looking about 30 years ago, in their nature.

For an EA, fake bids drag out sales and risk alienating buyers for a fairly negligible increase in commission, so it's unlikely this is the case, even if they choose to ignore the fact that it's against regulations which they're required to follow.

As with all conspiracy theories you just have to ask why would an estate agent make up bids?

Cant see it being worth the the time or the effort for the difference it would make to their bottom line.

You would think the faster the sale the less time spent selling it, so the more money they would make compared to dragging it out for a few euro extra. Pretty sure the extra cost in time would outweigh any extra money fake bids got.

There are 3 prices, the price the seller won't sell below, the price the buyer won't buy above and the price another buyer is willing to go to.

If the EAs makes up a fake bidder it might be to get you to go up to above the first of the 3 prices. They get 2 percent commission max so that 20 euros in every 1000 extra you bid. It's not worth the trouble they would be in if they get caught.

We we bought it was in 2012 and prices were down. Nothing was going over asking. My approach was to have a spread sheet with all our saving, and mortgage approval. What the repayments would be per 1000 borrowed and what I expected any work on the house to cost. I used that as a guide. The house we bought, we ended up below what the seller was willing to accept and had to bid against ourselves. I have zero regrets about doing that. My advice is to work out what you can afford and stick to it. If bidding get hot on a house, another one will come along so don't fret it. Still it's so nice when you can stop looking and have a free weekend instead of looking at houses that aren't what you thought they were from the picture.

In all my years on boards, and all the allegations about fake bids, it’s great that someone finally has proof that an EA made up fake bids.

Is your proof written or verbal, did DNG actually tell you that they made up the bid or did they write/email you to admit they did it?

Op, just consider why anyone else would be interested in the property, is it possible that the answer is the same reason you are? And sometimes bidders keep an eye on a property to see if the seller drops the price and will only engage when someone else makes a bid.

If you're going to make a very serious accusation I'd expect you to have some evidence.

And you aren't allowed accuse people of working for somewhere, either.

Agents can make up bids not to increase the extra few hundred they might get in commission but to make the sale. If the vendor has a target price, the EA can use fake bids to bid up a sole bidder on a property to this price.

I strongly suspect that one agent has tried this on me.

Lol, I would rate estate agents alongside recruitment agents and guys who knock on your door offering to "fix" your gutters.

What I find hilarious is the idea that you rang up an estate agent and they just confessed to inventing fake bids.

They make up a bid because anyone with sense doesn't bid against themselves. Say a house is asking 600 and I bid 575 and I am the sole bidder. I won't budge because I have no competition and the vendor won't budge because his head has been filled with shite about its value and is determined to get 600. The agent above all wants the sale to happen but is employed by the vendor.

You can ask the bidder to go up voluntarily but that rarely works. Prodding them up with fake bids is a better strategy to find a sole bidders true ceiling.

And that's what happens.

Because they are not risking 5750 for 250. They won't get 5750 unless they make a sale and with an obstinate vendor with an over valued property that will take time an EA doesn't have in a turnover business.

The play is a zero risk one. Bidder stays still, there is no sale and no commission. Bidder gets prodded up, chance of a sale increases as vendors expectations are closer to being met. Added bonus is commission gets slightly bigger but thats ultimately an irrelevance.

It's the same reason a underbid cash buyer might be preferred. Agents in the regular residential market work on volume and if a cash sale completes even marginally quicker and they get their commission sooner then that's worth the small difference to them.

The strategy isn't exactly grandmaster chess.

Sometimes the vendor is not for turning even in a falling market. And sometimes in a rising market they are away with the fairies too. In all cases the EA just wants to make a sale.

The EA won't make a sale if a bidder is far away from a vendor and a bidder won't move unless there is pressure to so. Ideally the vendor would come down to the market value, and a good agent will explain this. Sometimes the vendor says no and tells the agent they want more and then there's nothing they can do other than prod the bidder up, either by asking them or the creation of a fake bidding war. If they push it too far, you can always have the mysterious lead bidder drop out - and now the real bidders ceiling is known.

And if the real bidder pulls out, well then it's no loss as they didn't reach a price the vendor was happy with so a sale would never have happened. That's the important bit, and that's why fake bidding is essentially a risk free strategy for the agent and the vendor.

I was in a 'bidding' war before, 2 bids against me, went up 1k at a time. 4k in total. I told EA on the phone I was at my limit and he says first person to bid 2k more wins. Yea right, that was all the proof I needed that there was no other bidder. I offered the 2k more and went sale agreed. Suspicious doesn't even begin to describe the situation. An okay house in a bad area, nobody at open viewings, and yet there was a bid not far off asking that they were just sitting on until I came along? Yea right.

I would not trust some of these small family run operations anyway.