Currently buying/selling a house? How is it going? READ MOD NOTE POST #1

Cheapest I saw €1000 excluding vat but it was too far away to justify the €200, the solicitor now is in the same town and was quite surprised that she was that price, I usually associate anyone in my town to be robbers haha

Whatever you do go with a solicitor who has been recommended by someone who has used their service recently or you could have a nightmare.

I'm sale agreed hopefully closing in the next couple of weeks, there was a 5k booking deposit that was paid to the estate agent the day I went sale agreed months ago, do I need to get that back from them myself at a future date or will that be handed over to the vendors by them as part of the final sale amount or what usually happens there please?

Agree with this, cheaper solicitors may have higher volumes and that means slower response times.

People who are currently selling houses: Are you getting bids in where you expected to be? Is the market changing significantly?

Currently selling our first home - A rated 6 year old 4 bed semi D house in turn key condition with landscaped garden in a sought after suburb/boarder county of Dublin. We priced it low as advised by our estate agent with the hope of getting lots of interest. We've had 5 viewings with plenty of viewers but we're on the market 5 weeks now and we've had two bidders with all bids under the asking price still and very slow/bidding in €1k increments. There are no other houses in the town at a similar price point with the same credentials other than new builds which are €100k more than our asking price. Finding the whole thing very frustrating but we've never done this before so maybe this is typical.

We have ourselves previously bid on houses in our area and they've all gone sale agreed within a month at least 50-70K above asking price, wondering why ours is so slow/not reaching similar figures. Our house is in excellent condition - as per EA and viewers, is it the market changing?

We've just sold our property (3 bed in Swords), we also were advised to price a little under to get footfall through the door, which did happen. 3 weeks on the market, 3 sets of viewings, had 6 people bidding throughout, bids started at the asking price and we went sale agreed with a cash buyer last week, €42,000 over the asking price.

We also have just had our offer accepted on a 4 bed property last week, just 2 of us bidding and we went €40,000 over the asking. We were bidding against each other in 5k bids.

Hope this helps to give you an idea of how it went for us.

Yes the house is in an estate of other 6 year old A rated houses, there is a lovely green in front of the house, full of children playing in the evenings. The only negative feedback we're getting from viewers is that the estate is a good walking distance to local schools and the town (20 mins walk to the town and 18 mins walk to the train to commute to Dublin). There are a small number of older houses in the town for sale in the €350-400k bracket but they are quite dated or smaller.

You say there are no other comparable houses on the market at the moment? Can you check the property price register and see what comparable houses (perhaps in the same development) have sold for in recent times?

In my experience (trading up in a large commuter town) - houses which are turnkey and in good areas are selling quickly and usually 5%-10% over asking price. Houses which don't tick these boxes are often languishing on the market for months.

BUT - you need to have more than one strong bidder to generate a bidding war and drive up the price. Sounds like you don't have that yet, but you might just need to be patient/wait it out. You could just be unlucky with your timing.

The walk to schools/transport may be putting some bidders off. Hard to know without knowing the exact location. Are there shops/cafe's etc nearby?

Do a google search on your estate and see if anything funny comes up, like a crimelord or something :)

When we were looking we would google and also if we saw any unkept houses around the house we were looking at it just put us right off.

I dont think 20 minutes walk to a train or a school would bother people these days at all.

Also anyone with any cop on at all just ignores the BER. We bought a house that was a D2 and had it straight up to a B2 with minimal spend. Could get it up to a B1 withy another couple of thousand, but not really bothered.

Thanks for this, good to know about the BER. I always thought it'd cost a fortune to improve the rating.

We were outbid twice, and have found a fixer upper house we really want! We viewed it a week and a half ago and lord does it need a lot of work - as in, it needs to be completely gutted. There was one offer on it of the asking price, so over a week ago we put in an offer of 10k over the asking, other bidder isn't bothered putting anymore in and the seller is still sitting on our offer. Pretty stressful!

Yeah noticed this also, must be other websites scraping.

The cost of a mortgage for a buyer on that house is way higher now and likely be higher again by time it closes. So people bidding on other houses in estate have much lower mortgage. A house is worth what people are willing to pay. Hopefully bidding keeps going and you get the price you wanted but you cant simply assume itll be worth more.

Probably 100 from yourself :)

90% of the interest is in the first 2 weeks. People have notifications set and your property is triggering them. Some of them are just curious, but your buyer is probably in there. Thats what the EA told us anyway and i think it was true. The hits will go up fast and then start tapering off.