Can an estate agent refuse an offer that is "too low"?

I believe they are obliged to report it to the seller. The seller may have made it clear that they won’t entertain offers below asking though.

If you put a low ball offer in that is clearly well under the current value of the property, why on earth would the agent waste their and their client's time even reading the offer.

If a property if on the market for many months, there may be a case for it

seller can have told them not to accept anything under the asking price

It absolutely is.

How do you know the asking price is realistic, even in today's market?

Estate agent should be passing on all offers to the seller. They can be rejected in two minutes.

That depends if you think the asking price is reasonable in today's market.

No. There’s no requirement at all. Some sellers want to be kept informed of everything. Others don’t.

In current market anything under asking isn't going to be entertained. Estate agents favourite game is to put asking price way under what they know it will sell for to get people interested. If you want to be taken serious as a bidder understand the market and bid accordingly.

And other agents put up properties with an "asking price" of what they hope to get which may be very aspirational and would consider sums below the "asking". Different tactics by agent. If you're watching a market you can usually suss which agents price keenly to trigger bidding wars and which agents price high.

OP should make their offer and ask to be kept updated of any further offers and keep looking elsewhere and not get het up on the legalese of agents forwarding offers.

It is a private sale of a piece of private property. They can essentially do whatever they want. They don't owe you anything, they don't have to be transparent, nor have to explain themselves to you. They don't even have to pick up the phone to you if they don't feel like it.

If it was a public tender for a public service or a piece of property owned by a public body, it would be very different.

It's possibly a function of the market where I am - lots of identical apartments and houses with plenty turnover so the market price is readily obtainable off the PPR. I expect the psychology is that both parties know the "market value" and the seller is trying to cajole a few more quid out of the buyer (ie shame them into going say 95% of the "asking" which may be 5% more than recent sales). I've noticed that the agent who's first name rhymes with a fruit tend to have higher askings than the smaller or local agents around me anyway.

Or else some agent's business model is tell the vendor a large market value to get the listing in the first place. I'd expect at the lower end of the market, agents price the properties keen to capitalise on market FOMO of buyers in that market segment.

You do. But there's no harm in asking. The properties that have been on the market for a fair while are the ones more likely to be open to dropping their price. No guarantee that they will, but a much better chance that if the property has only just started to be marketed.

Unless there are already offers above it then its a perfectly reasonable starting price.

If the house is on for €450k and somebody offers €440k and its the highest bid, what is the issue?

I've noticed some people can be very stubborn on price. You see stuff over priced sit for years and years.

Always curious why

It makes no difference really. Your bid has been recorded anyway. Its not like it didnt exist. Its just too low to bother with.

If it happened that there were no higher bids the EA would most probably say to the vendor that they did receive an offer of x, but you told us that was too low. maybe you want to consider it in light of no higher bids.

But any higher bids come in and yours would just be thrown in the bin.

OP, the seller can sell to whom he likes. Even if you offer more, they can decide to sell to a lower bidder for whatever reason they want to.

To call this unreasonable without literally any context is absurd. Even in the current market i know people who are sale agreed for very small % above asking - and that's final bid, not opening.

I doubt the 8 people that liked this comment are buyers.

We bid asking price for our house last year and finalised the sale in January.

But it doesn’t matter a jot to how other houses sell. The vendor and estate agent are within their rights to not accept any bid so that’s all the matters

As mentioned above, there’s no finite ‘value’ on any house. The market decides the price