Bidding Advice?

MetHerInSolas

House on market for 295,000 - looking for advice on what to initially bid?

House in my opinion is over priced maybe by €10,000 and it’s been on market 6 months or so.

I am new to the whole bidding process and any advice would be gratefully received.

Cheers

DublinDilbert

Estate can be like sharks. Before bidding establish the background to the property, make sure you have a witness too. Ask for example are there currently any offers on the property. If you think its over valued by 10K, then €280K would be a very strong offer, still leaving you a little scope to go up.

Butters1979

Bidding can be a strange game, dealing with other bidders, EA's and the vendor, it's hard to tell what everyone is thinking. Especially the vendor, do they believe it's worth 295k? Have they put an asking price as the minimum they'd accept or have they put something higher up in the hope of getting it but may take a lower offer? It's really hard to know.

You need to ask yourself what's the max you think it's worth. I would bid lower than your max at the start to give some room to move up. Then it's the waiting game. Have you asked are there any other bids?

Bacchus

MetHerInSolas wrote: »

House on market for 295,000 - looking for advice on what to initially bid?

House in my opinion is over priced maybe by €10,000 and it’s been on market 6 months or so.

I am new to the whole bidding process and any advice would be gratefully received.

Cheers

Hey,

We were in a similar situation recently currently. Guide was €275k but we felt it was worth more around €265 (based on a few other houses in the area that sold in the past 24 months). We had to decide whether to go in high and strong and hope to just blow any other interested parties out of the water or go in low. We went in at €255k. This drew out another bidder (assuming the EA wasn't making it up) and gradually it crept back up to the asking (we won the bid btw).

So... read in to that whatever you think. Had we gone in at asking in the first place, who knows, maybe that would have stirred up more interest (bidders are like sheep) and it could have gone even higher. On the other hand maybe it would have saved us 3 weeks of a bidding war.

My advice would be to think about your budget. We were looking around at €300k+ properties as it was technically in our budget but we were easily out bid by other bidders. So, we changed tactic, we looked around at properties where we would be able to be strong bidders and it worked for us. Obviously it means sacrificing something in the property (location, size, finish, etc.) but we've ended up a house we're excited to be moving in to and we're not totally broke doing so

Second piece of advice would be to keep the bidding slow. Don't get caught up in a blur of counterbids in a single day. We had a general rule, no more than 1 bid per day, 2 in a week... well right up until the final day in which we felt the bidding was drawing to an end and there were a few (small) counter offers back and forth.

A piece of advice we got too was, if it is a house you really want, stay in the bid as long as you can. You can always pull out if you want. I'm not sure about that one myself as you're only driving up the price which could set a baseline for other properties in the area that you might be interested in too.

Naid23

Friend of mine bought a house last year and had a really weird bidding situation. He placed an offer about 20k below asking and was told there was another bidder and so the price creeped back up and up to over the asking price.
His brother called the agency pretending to be interested in the house and the EA told him there was only one person bidding for the house (i.e. his brother). He was basically bidding against himself, so told them that he was withdrawing his offer. 2 weeks later he got a phonecall to say his original offer of 20k below was accepted. Complaint was put in after they got the keys but dont know what happened after that.

Is it possible to request proof of an opposing bid on a house? Looking to buy this year and the whole process is a bit mental.

Butters1979

Naid23 wrote: »

Is it possible to request proof of an opposing bid on a house? Looking to buy this year and the whole process is a bit mental.

You cannot, as it is someone else's private information, and I'd imagine there's a risk of trying to contact or even intimidate rival bidders. However I believe the governing body that investigates such complaints like the one you mentioned has the ability to request it. But I don't know details.

There should be a system in place to be able to show current highest bid without revealing personnel details. If ebay can do it. In fact, we should just use ebay and do away with EA's all together IMHO.

Bacchus

Butters1979 wrote: »

There should be a system in place to be able to show current highest bid without revealing personnel details. If ebay can do it. In fact, we should just use ebay and do away with EA's all together IMHO.

Going well off topic but yeah, there should be some system. It doesn't have to be rocket science either. Anyone interested in purchasing a house must register with some central body, at which point their are assigned a random alpha-numeric reference code. Any properties on the market must be listed with this same central body. When a person wants to put in a bid, they contact the EA and provide their reference code which the EA uses to register the bid. Only registered EAs may submit bids on properties - bidders shouldn't be able to put on bids themselves as you'd end up with a load of bids that are not serious being submitted and it'd be more open to abuse. This way, there is a paper trail that is visible to all parties (that are registered on the system) without revealing any personal info (except to the EA, who has that info anyway). I'm sure there's a few kinks in that plan but surely something like that would go a long way to removing any element of shenanigans that goes on with EAs and phantom bidders.