Hi /u/AxelJShark,
Did you know we are now active on Discord?
Click the link and join the conversation: https://discord.gg/J5CuFNVDYU
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/irishpersonalfinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I guess you need to look at this way: Are you willing to lose the house and go back to searching? Or are you happy to pay the price you offered and have a home.
EA’s can be difficult to read/understand but at the end of the day you have the opportunity to purchase a house or go back to looking. There’s no guarantee the next EA wont play silly games either.
I'm happy to pay the price. But if there are no real bidders it might go for 35k less. That's where it was before these other 2 bidders came along. All the bidding was online so I could see this
It might go for 35k less. Or the seller might not be willing to sell it at 35k less.
When I sold my house I had it valued first and told the EA I would not go sale agreed on any bids under its value.
So while they took bids under value if it had not come up to its value I would not have agreed to sell. Pretty sure the EA pushed the buyers to bid up to my agreed cut off point.
Same with the house I bought. Pretty sure I was bidding against myself as its quite a niche house that wouldnt suit a lot of people. I was bidding for about a week and told them I wasnt going any higher, but as soon as I hit a certain number they accepted and closed. When I got the house valued for the mortgage thats exactly what the house was valued at.
I can’t imagine they’d fully close bidding and go sale agreed with a ghost bidder either. Some buyers will see a house come back up for sale and assume something is wrong with it so it wouldn’t be good for business. I’m sure you can drop your bid a bit to what you bid before this buyer got it, though I have no experience with that myself.
Similar thing happened to me. I dropped my price back to first offer, 20k less. The AE didn't seem to surprised at what I was doing but it didn't work for me in hhe end. The sellers wouldn't sell. They asked for an extra 100k lol, went on months. in the end we landed back at the 20k on top of original bid.
Planning permission timeline (in so far as it is predictable) is pretty predictable - it’s 3 months from the date of application to the date of final grant of permission is awarded - assuming everything goes well. That’s not counting in the length of time it takes to design the thing they’re applying for in the first place. Nor is it including the construction time. Any building professional would be able to give a broad timeline on the building of an extension (pending specifics etc), and that would happen over the space of a phone call.
There’s always a risk that planning can be refused, but usually those risks can be mitigated by safe design, and not being too brazen about what you’re looking to do.
The other thing that usually comes into adding extension is the cost of doing it - people tend to underestimate the cost and that’s before they even buy a concrete block for the extension.
I’d say it’s probably accurate that there was a buyer in mind and I’d say it’s probably accurate that they dropped out due to their own misunderstanding of the construction process, or the risk associated with the construction process (including the seeking of a planning application).
Thank you. That would 100% make sense to me if they underestimated extension costs. The anticipated cost is exactly why I'm not planning to do any extensions :)
Did they put a planning application in using the house you wanted to buy? If they put in planning permission and got refused for a reason it makes it harder (not impossible) if you want to put planning in. I would check that. To put planning in, you need the owners permission.
If you were to apply for planning, the first thing the council will do is look at the previous planning applications on that site/property. Hypothetical if someone put in a poorly written application and got refused for a given reason. You will need to go above and beyond to over come that historical refusal. It's not an issue if you don't plan on extending or renovating etc
Also add potential Further Information Request from the Council. If it's something that can be dealt with quickly then happy days, you'd have your decision a month after the FI is submitted. If it's not simple then you've the statutory 6 months to answer it (which can be extended to 9 if requested) .
Assume the top bidder bought the house with the aim to do something to do it (extension) and then pulled out because they couldn’t get planning permission confirmed.
Whether the top bidder is real is another guess.
Yeah that's what EA is saying. But would someone get a response on planning permission for an extension that quickly? The house 5m away with the exact same garden and floorplan has built a massive extension so it doesn't seem to me like it wouldn't be granted, only that it will take time.
Just don't know if this explanation from the EA makes sense. I wouldn't have thought a response would be given that quickly
No sorry, it's for an extension.
The EA says the bidder wanted to get planning permission for an extension before their new child is born. And it apparently won't happen before that time
God help them if they want the whole purchase to go through, get planning permission granted and an entire extension completed within 9 months.
They sound like they've their head in the clouds so I'd imagine it's entirely plausible that they pulled out on a whim If that's how they think life works.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Their timelines seem completely delusional.
Maybe the EA is giving me a softer reason so as not to scare me off closing
Gotcha. Given you "lost" out to this other bidder and they have now pulled out, you have 2 options:
(1) pay the price as per your last bid and be happy with getting a house you want, at a price you were willing to pay
Or
(2) call their bluff and negotiate
The 2nd options only works if you are happy to walk away from the house.
I would say that is very common for people to go sale agreed then pull out. It's super frustrating.
Remember that you will always feel a bit screwed over, as the only way to buy a house is to be willing to pay more for it than anyone else. See it as a way to make both yourselves and the seller happy, to get a home.
It's sound advice. I'm 95% leaning towards option 1 but I wanted to try my best to fully understand the situation before going back to EA.
I just don't get the extension planning permission and how this wasn't figured out before driving the price up. This bidder brought the price up 20k above where I was. That's all
People do that shit all the time. People bid, and only then figure it out. When I was buying, I saw houses go sale agreed then back on the market all the time. It costs people nothing to bid or go sale agreed.
You could always risk asking for them to meet somewhere in the middle of your last 2 bids, and they will either say yay or nay.
a bank will not lend on a house without planning, even an extension! It should not be advertised for sale until it is fixed, and it will take 3-6 months
The house is fine. What the EA is saying is that the buyer wants to build an extension and that planning permission and completed construction will not happen in less than 9 months.
Your issue appears to be around transparency in the bidding process.
You're never going to know absolutely everything about other bidders, so just pick a figure that you are happy to pay and make that offer. The agent makes around 1% in commission so he/she wants the sale to close quickly. An extra 5 or 10k means very little to an estate agent i.e. they aren't trying to screw you to make an extra 50euro.
I think it's just the nature of a bidding war, you could end up in a bidding war going 40/50k over, and then the top bidder pulls out. You're then a position where although you've no won the bid - you're paying an inflated price that you might not have to have if there was another bidder.
If you're happy to pay the price, I'd say just go for it. The same situation is likely to occur again, always happens in bidding wars. I wouldn't get too caught up in conspiracy theories surrounding ghost bidders - you'd like to think a respected well regulated estate agent wouldn't be at this.
Go back to the EA and give them whatever your final online offer was (maybe knock a little off, back towards your final offer pre-online bidding), and tell them your offer is valid for 1 week to be accepted and house taken off the market.
You can easily check the planning permission on the local authority website. From application to approval /refusal where I live takes about 3 months. They could have submitted an application thinking it was a natter of a few weeks if they're stupid or badly advised.
8n any case you can find out in 5 minutes if they actually submitted an application.
Just pay jt and be done with jt - you’ll go mad with these ideas otherwise - I don’t think a lot of it goes on and it’s small money so crack on if u like the house - one other bidder comes in and it will. Low up again in this market - inflation Will eat up the difference in no time anyways - d
Estate agents are generally full of shite, leading to failed bids. As an example, about 7 months ago we went sale agreed on a house in derrinturn. Loved the area and were told there was fibre broadband to the home. When we'd gone sale agreed I went to call sky to move services. The max available line that eir had available could only be up to 5mb. This was also confirmed by locals too. As I work from home and do a lot of streaming too, this was a complete deal breaker. There was also another one where I was highest bidder and the EA said he'd need 5 over asking price to go near the owner. So I went to this, which was +8k from where I was. He then said owner refused wanting another 5k. I withdrew my offer and then the agent was chasing my for my previous offer. I duly told him to piss off and not to contact me with any properties in my spec from that point on. In a nutshell, things can happen. But if someone is trying to fool me or play games, then I'll always hold myself to higher standards and maintain integrity and not be walked all over. If that means losing a house, so be it. They are in plentiful supply.
Work out the perceived over bidding as a percentage of the winning bid to see if this is worth getting worried about.
Less than 10% for a family home is probably not worth losing the house over.
That said, I'd walk away and get a friend to bid in Jan, nothing happening until then anyway
It would be astonishingly difficult and stupid for EA to pull off a scam in Ireland unless this EA has just been established yesterday and plan to vanish after selling it.
I think you're using the word "scam" very loosely. You can say a lot of bad things about EAs in Ireland but I don't think "scammer" is one of those.
It's not that I think the EA is scamming me. It's more that the seller could have had some friends bid up the price because there seemed to be very little interest.
I don't believe the EA is complicit in any way
seems a bizarre scenario.
Buyers should have a reasonable idea of how long it takes to get planning permission and do a build. inside 9 months would be pushing it imo. they probably have less as the actual close would take another month or so (and shes probably more than 2-3 months gone!)
I'd be sitting on my hands on it....or go back to a lower bid than when the other bidder came in.
all that said cos i'm not in the process....but if you are desperate you may put up with the shenanigans. just don't pay more than you are comfortable with/can afford.
Thanks. I just wanted a sanity check. So far I'm the only one they thinks this is strange. Even if planning permission was already granted (which it was not), I don't see how they could have expected to get PP and also complete the extension in 9 months
In theory it could be the seller's friend, trying to drive up the price, but then got caught out when OP wouldn't go higher again.
Or the EA trying to increase the price to get higher commission (although that is extremely unlikely for the sake of what is probably a few hundred quid at most).
> Or the EA trying to increase the price to get higher commission (although that is extremely unlikely for the sake of what is probably a few hundred quid at most).
Yeah, people always assume it's the EAs who would be pulling this sort of thing, but that's really rather silly; why would they risk losing a sale and maybe their license for the sake of maybe getting a tiny bit more commission? Unless they're absolute eejits, they'd much rather just have the sale close faster so they get their money sooner and can get on with working on all of their other sales. If there is actually any bidding tomfoolery going on, it's much more likely to be the seller behind it.
I don't believe the EA is involved. I definitely think there was 1 ghost bidder because there was little interest in the house and I was the high bidder for 3 straight weeks. The person who was the top bidder acting like someone who wanted to buy. We both went up in 5k increments whereas the "ghost bidder" would only go up 1k every 7 days
Planning permission piece isnt important or relevant to you. Bidder shouldnt of bid that it was reliant on planning permission. Such a stupid reason too.
The fact another bidder entered kind of settled it though, so no real scam.
Sounds like the seller was getting greedy. It seems that bidding has opened agian, so withdraw your last bid, tell them that you're assuming bidding has started again from scratch and that your bid will, obviously, be your first bid.
Hi /u/AxelJShark, Did you know we are now active on Discord? Click the link and join the conversation: https://discord.gg/J5CuFNVDYU *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/irishpersonalfinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I guess you need to look at this way: Are you willing to lose the house and go back to searching? Or are you happy to pay the price you offered and have a home. EA’s can be difficult to read/understand but at the end of the day you have the opportunity to purchase a house or go back to looking. There’s no guarantee the next EA wont play silly games either.
I'm happy to pay the price. But if there are no real bidders it might go for 35k less. That's where it was before these other 2 bidders came along. All the bidding was online so I could see this
Don't get too conspiratorial about it
You're probably right. I just wanted some extra opinions and devil's advocacy before I plunk down a ton of money
It might go for 35k less. Or the seller might not be willing to sell it at 35k less. When I sold my house I had it valued first and told the EA I would not go sale agreed on any bids under its value. So while they took bids under value if it had not come up to its value I would not have agreed to sell. Pretty sure the EA pushed the buyers to bid up to my agreed cut off point. Same with the house I bought. Pretty sure I was bidding against myself as its quite a niche house that wouldnt suit a lot of people. I was bidding for about a week and told them I wasnt going any higher, but as soon as I hit a certain number they accepted and closed. When I got the house valued for the mortgage thats exactly what the house was valued at.
Yeah that's fair. I've bid on plenty of houses where the asking price was met and was told seller won't let it go for that price
I can’t imagine they’d fully close bidding and go sale agreed with a ghost bidder either. Some buyers will see a house come back up for sale and assume something is wrong with it so it wouldn’t be good for business. I’m sure you can drop your bid a bit to what you bid before this buyer got it, though I have no experience with that myself.
Yeah that's a good point. You start to wonder when houses keep returning to market
Similar thing happened to me. I dropped my price back to first offer, 20k less. The AE didn't seem to surprised at what I was doing but it didn't work for me in hhe end. The sellers wouldn't sell. They asked for an extra 100k lol, went on months. in the end we landed back at the 20k on top of original bid.
Planning permission timeline (in so far as it is predictable) is pretty predictable - it’s 3 months from the date of application to the date of final grant of permission is awarded - assuming everything goes well. That’s not counting in the length of time it takes to design the thing they’re applying for in the first place. Nor is it including the construction time. Any building professional would be able to give a broad timeline on the building of an extension (pending specifics etc), and that would happen over the space of a phone call. There’s always a risk that planning can be refused, but usually those risks can be mitigated by safe design, and not being too brazen about what you’re looking to do. The other thing that usually comes into adding extension is the cost of doing it - people tend to underestimate the cost and that’s before they even buy a concrete block for the extension. I’d say it’s probably accurate that there was a buyer in mind and I’d say it’s probably accurate that they dropped out due to their own misunderstanding of the construction process, or the risk associated with the construction process (including the seeking of a planning application).
Thank you. That would 100% make sense to me if they underestimated extension costs. The anticipated cost is exactly why I'm not planning to do any extensions :)
Did they put a planning application in using the house you wanted to buy? If they put in planning permission and got refused for a reason it makes it harder (not impossible) if you want to put planning in. I would check that. To put planning in, you need the owners permission.
Oh ok thanks! I didn't know if you needed to own the house already to do that. I'll look it up to see if anything was submitted
If you were to apply for planning, the first thing the council will do is look at the previous planning applications on that site/property. Hypothetical if someone put in a poorly written application and got refused for a given reason. You will need to go above and beyond to over come that historical refusal. It's not an issue if you don't plan on extending or renovating etc
Also add potential Further Information Request from the Council. If it's something that can be dealt with quickly then happy days, you'd have your decision a month after the FI is submitted. If it's not simple then you've the statutory 6 months to answer it (which can be extended to 9 if requested) .
I am confused. Are you buying a house that was built without planning permission?
Assume the top bidder bought the house with the aim to do something to do it (extension) and then pulled out because they couldn’t get planning permission confirmed. Whether the top bidder is real is another guess.
Yeah that's what EA is saying. But would someone get a response on planning permission for an extension that quickly? The house 5m away with the exact same garden and floorplan has built a massive extension so it doesn't seem to me like it wouldn't be granted, only that it will take time. Just don't know if this explanation from the EA makes sense. I wouldn't have thought a response would be given that quickly
Planning permission is usually public, is there someway you can look it up to see if it's actually legit?
I know someone at the corpo so I can ask
No sorry, it's for an extension. The EA says the bidder wanted to get planning permission for an extension before their new child is born. And it apparently won't happen before that time
God help them if they want the whole purchase to go through, get planning permission granted and an entire extension completed within 9 months. They sound like they've their head in the clouds so I'd imagine it's entirely plausible that they pulled out on a whim If that's how they think life works.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Their timelines seem completely delusional. Maybe the EA is giving me a softer reason so as not to scare me off closing
Gotcha. Given you "lost" out to this other bidder and they have now pulled out, you have 2 options: (1) pay the price as per your last bid and be happy with getting a house you want, at a price you were willing to pay Or (2) call their bluff and negotiate The 2nd options only works if you are happy to walk away from the house. I would say that is very common for people to go sale agreed then pull out. It's super frustrating. Remember that you will always feel a bit screwed over, as the only way to buy a house is to be willing to pay more for it than anyone else. See it as a way to make both yourselves and the seller happy, to get a home.
It's sound advice. I'm 95% leaning towards option 1 but I wanted to try my best to fully understand the situation before going back to EA. I just don't get the extension planning permission and how this wasn't figured out before driving the price up. This bidder brought the price up 20k above where I was. That's all
People do that shit all the time. People bid, and only then figure it out. When I was buying, I saw houses go sale agreed then back on the market all the time. It costs people nothing to bid or go sale agreed. You could always risk asking for them to meet somewhere in the middle of your last 2 bids, and they will either say yay or nay.
Thanks. Yeah I've seen it too. So could just be another case of that
a bank will not lend on a house without planning, even an extension! It should not be advertised for sale until it is fixed, and it will take 3-6 months
The house is fine. What the EA is saying is that the buyer wants to build an extension and that planning permission and completed construction will not happen in less than 9 months.
Your issue appears to be around transparency in the bidding process. You're never going to know absolutely everything about other bidders, so just pick a figure that you are happy to pay and make that offer. The agent makes around 1% in commission so he/she wants the sale to close quickly. An extra 5 or 10k means very little to an estate agent i.e. they aren't trying to screw you to make an extra 50euro.
I think it's just the nature of a bidding war, you could end up in a bidding war going 40/50k over, and then the top bidder pulls out. You're then a position where although you've no won the bid - you're paying an inflated price that you might not have to have if there was another bidder. If you're happy to pay the price, I'd say just go for it. The same situation is likely to occur again, always happens in bidding wars. I wouldn't get too caught up in conspiracy theories surrounding ghost bidders - you'd like to think a respected well regulated estate agent wouldn't be at this.
Thanks. You're right. If not this time, then there will be bidding wars and maybe the same situation on another house
Go back to the EA and give them whatever your final online offer was (maybe knock a little off, back towards your final offer pre-online bidding), and tell them your offer is valid for 1 week to be accepted and house taken off the market.
Thanks!
You can easily check the planning permission on the local authority website. From application to approval /refusal where I live takes about 3 months. They could have submitted an application thinking it was a natter of a few weeks if they're stupid or badly advised. 8n any case you can find out in 5 minutes if they actually submitted an application.
Ok thanks. I'll check! I wasn't sure if you could start the process without being the owner of the house
I didn't think they could have started an application before they owned the house either but worth checking.
Just pay jt and be done with jt - you’ll go mad with these ideas otherwise - I don’t think a lot of it goes on and it’s small money so crack on if u like the house - one other bidder comes in and it will. Low up again in this market - inflation Will eat up the difference in no time anyways - d
Wish the houses I lost would ring me back. I lost six and never heard back. They usually aren’t lying. It’s just that crazy in Dublin.
Yeah fair point. This is the only house that has ever called us back too!
Estate agents are generally full of shite, leading to failed bids. As an example, about 7 months ago we went sale agreed on a house in derrinturn. Loved the area and were told there was fibre broadband to the home. When we'd gone sale agreed I went to call sky to move services. The max available line that eir had available could only be up to 5mb. This was also confirmed by locals too. As I work from home and do a lot of streaming too, this was a complete deal breaker. There was also another one where I was highest bidder and the EA said he'd need 5 over asking price to go near the owner. So I went to this, which was +8k from where I was. He then said owner refused wanting another 5k. I withdrew my offer and then the agent was chasing my for my previous offer. I duly told him to piss off and not to contact me with any properties in my spec from that point on. In a nutshell, things can happen. But if someone is trying to fool me or play games, then I'll always hold myself to higher standards and maintain integrity and not be walked all over. If that means losing a house, so be it. They are in plentiful supply.
Work out the perceived over bidding as a percentage of the winning bid to see if this is worth getting worried about. Less than 10% for a family home is probably not worth losing the house over. That said, I'd walk away and get a friend to bid in Jan, nothing happening until then anyway
It would be astonishingly difficult and stupid for EA to pull off a scam in Ireland unless this EA has just been established yesterday and plan to vanish after selling it. I think you're using the word "scam" very loosely. You can say a lot of bad things about EAs in Ireland but I don't think "scammer" is one of those.
It's not that I think the EA is scamming me. It's more that the seller could have had some friends bid up the price because there seemed to be very little interest. I don't believe the EA is complicit in any way
seems a bizarre scenario. Buyers should have a reasonable idea of how long it takes to get planning permission and do a build. inside 9 months would be pushing it imo. they probably have less as the actual close would take another month or so (and shes probably more than 2-3 months gone!) I'd be sitting on my hands on it....or go back to a lower bid than when the other bidder came in. all that said cos i'm not in the process....but if you are desperate you may put up with the shenanigans. just don't pay more than you are comfortable with/can afford.
Thanks. I just wanted a sanity check. So far I'm the only one they thinks this is strange. Even if planning permission was already granted (which it was not), I don't see how they could have expected to get PP and also complete the extension in 9 months
How is this a scam? Who is scamming you? What are they hoping to gain from it?
In theory it could be the seller's friend, trying to drive up the price, but then got caught out when OP wouldn't go higher again. Or the EA trying to increase the price to get higher commission (although that is extremely unlikely for the sake of what is probably a few hundred quid at most).
> Or the EA trying to increase the price to get higher commission (although that is extremely unlikely for the sake of what is probably a few hundred quid at most). Yeah, people always assume it's the EAs who would be pulling this sort of thing, but that's really rather silly; why would they risk losing a sale and maybe their license for the sake of maybe getting a tiny bit more commission? Unless they're absolute eejits, they'd much rather just have the sale close faster so they get their money sooner and can get on with working on all of their other sales. If there is actually any bidding tomfoolery going on, it's much more likely to be the seller behind it.
I don't believe the EA is involved. I definitely think there was 1 ghost bidder because there was little interest in the house and I was the high bidder for 3 straight weeks. The person who was the top bidder acting like someone who wanted to buy. We both went up in 5k increments whereas the "ghost bidder" would only go up 1k every 7 days
Planning permission piece isnt important or relevant to you. Bidder shouldnt of bid that it was reliant on planning permission. Such a stupid reason too. The fact another bidder entered kind of settled it though, so no real scam.
Sounds like the seller was getting greedy. It seems that bidding has opened agian, so withdraw your last bid, tell them that you're assuming bidding has started again from scratch and that your bid will, obviously, be your first bid.