Auction V Private treaty

silverharp

Does anyone know if auction activity is dropping, was looking on myhome yesterday and there seemed to be a lot of houses in my area going for private treaty, whereas a couple of years back most would have gone for auction. Is this just another sign that the frenzy is going out of the market and sellers would prefer to have a house not sell then rather then taking the auction price.

seamus

Well, you don't necessarily have to "take the auction price". You set a minimum price, and if you're not getting that, you can withdraw the house from the auction.

The auction market died well before the market hit it's current freeze. Much of the auctioning was for large homes and large estates - the former being bought by wealthy people trading up, and the latter being bought by developers. Developers very suddenly stopped buying land late last year, and even the wealthy had realised that auction prices were being way overinflated by developers and those with more money than sense.

From what I gather, any of the mad auction action which took place over the last few years is completely gone now. The auction houses are ghost towns a lot of the time.

jdivision

you pay more to run an auction campaign for a property and there's no guarantee it'll sell so people are avoiding it for the moment

loyatemu

the Irish Times property supplement last week had figures showing auction numbers are down very significantly on last year - over 50% fewer.

silverharp

Thanks, your responses make complete sense. On our road some of the sales in the past couple of years were people trading down from large piles up in Ballsbridge, so in that context they didn't seem to mind over paying