Bidding on a House

Just bid up to what you’re happy to pay.

If the estate agent says there’s a higher bid, just tell them your last bit is the best you can do.

If the higher bid is a phantom one, and there are no other interested parties, then the estate agent will come back to you.

I bid on a house a few months ago. It had been on the market a good 6+ weeks when we went to see it, and there was one bid 60k under the asking price. We made a bid, as soon as we did another bidder turned up, within two days it was 15k over the asking price and we pulled out. Two days later we get a phone call to say the other bidder has mysteriously pulled out and do we want it, I was not happy but my wife still really wanted the house. We ended up settling on 10k under asking and went sale agreed.

We then get a survey done and the house is not in the condition they were claiming/it was priced for and we end up pulling out. Two months later it's still on the market, so the only other serious bidder on this property in the past 4 months happened to get involved at the exact same time that we did? Complete and utter horseshít.

This is anecdotal, but it's a story that I've shared before.

A good friend of mine bought a house in 2021 where he suspected that he was "bidding" against a phantom. He would place an offer perhaps 4-5k over the previous offer, and it would sit there for a week. Then, another offer of perhaps 500-1000 euro would arrive. This happened about three times. When the EA asked him whether he wished to make another offer, he said that he would match the new offer. This apparently confused the EA, but as it was all over phone and email, there was no way to force a higher offer as would be possible with online bidding. There were no further "offers", and he got the house, albeit at about 30k more than the asking price.

Sadly, until things changes, EAs will continue to behave like this, but if you want to buy these days, you need to wade through the vipers.

True, but in fairness, a lot of this behaviour could be mitigated by the vendors themselves. When my mother and her siblings sold my grandmother's home last year, they opted to accept the offer of an investor over that of an Irish family, even though there was but 15k of a difference on a 700k house. I was disgusted with them, but thankfully the sale eventually fell through and the other party won the house. It's now occupied by a family with three young children, according to the neighbour.

Personally, if and when I sell my house, I will tell the EA that I want it sold it to a family. This may seem rather high and mighty of me, but we're in such a bad state because we'll allowed pursuit of the bottom line to become the justifying factor for everything. Improvement begins at home after all.

Thank you, but I think it's just really basic consideration for the long-term health of an area. The town I live in is a nice town, and I wouldn't want some slum-lord to buy my house, nor would I want to force that upon my neighbours.

...or maybe the problem with the rental sector is the sheer amount of speculation in our property markets, which in turn is causing the never ending upward movement of rental prices, and of course the catastrophic problems in our overall supply problems.....

....or maybe the other bidder never actually existed!

Is there a way to find out for sure?

Yes. You call the EA's bluff and tell him your previous bid was your last, you won't be going any higher.

If he says that's fine, and best of luck in your future search, you'll know you got it wrong.

go way otta that nonsense, speculation is at the heart of our property problems, this has become a global problem now, particularly in advanced economies such as ours, its the major failure of a heavily financialised property market....

I did this before, EA told me where to go. A YEAR later the EA rings me and says the vendor will accept my original bid! By then I had moved onto other things. A while later the property was on the property price register selling for a 100K less than my bid. If I was the vendor I would had been furious with the EA...

Not everything is about race. Families do come in all races you know.

You seemed upset that it didn't go to an "Irish family". Perhaps it will once it's rented and all will be well.

And I'm sorry now, but an investor paying 700k for a single family home is not a "slum king".

Tiresome bollocks hijacking every thread.

As a person who successfully bought this year and faced a similar dilemma, stick with your budget and gut OP. It took us a while with the EA, but we eventually got there.

So a timeline for us,

• We underbid on a house early this year by almost 45K.
• Three weeks later got a call from the EA saying that there was no other offer on the property, but the vendor wasn't going to accept my offer as it was too low. We decided to have a second viewing and a long conversation with him. He suggest we increase our offer by €25 ~ €30K if we were serious and the vendor will happily go sale agreed.
• A week later, we decided to increase our offer by only €10K. (at this time we were bidding against ourselves, which is a big NO/NO)
• The following week - they decided to reduce the house asking price by €20K and had couple more viewings. (so at this time the asking price was still €15K more than our offer)
• 3 weeks later got a call from the EA asking if we could meet them in the middle. So basically offer 7.5K more and they will go sale agreed. We told them No.
• The next week we got a call saying there was another offer for €5K more than ours. At this stage we were kicking ourselves if we should have gone with the additional 7.5K the week before, but eventually decided to stick to our existing offer and said we won't be increasing our bid.
• Another 3 weeks later got a call saying that the €5K offer was dropped and if I would step in. I told them NO.
• A week later got another call, EA was asking if we could at least increase the offer by another €3K to make the vendor happy and go sale agreed. Told him No again. 15 minutes later on the same call we went sale agreed for the offer we put almost 2 months ago and 3 months since our initial offer.

Looking back good thing we didn't even increase the offer by €3K as that money certainly came in handy when painting the house or putting in laminate flooring etc..

But at the end of the day it is a gamble and worked out for us.

I'd believe that, but I have experienced sales where the house is simply left up for sale for weeks with open bids on it. Perhaps this is more the vendors refusal to accept an offer in hopes of something higher?