Where to search for properties

With Approval in Principle (AIP) in hand, we are ready to search for properties. As mentioned in the earlier post, there is a shortage of properties for sale in Ireland, so there’s not many places we can go to see houses. Most properties are posted in daft.ie or myhome.ie. The key is to make sure that you search for homes that are newly posted, typically within the week. Between posting, viewing and closing bids, could be within 2-3 weeks. If you see a house that is more than a month, chances are it’s already sale agreed and they have not taken down the ads.

House Viewing

Once you see a property that you are interested in, first is to contact the estate agent and ask when is the viewing. Sometimes the viewing is by appointment only. They only take bids if you have already seen the house, so make sure you make it for the house viewing. We believe some folks managed to get in bids without seeing the house, not sure what they would have told the estate agent.

You should expect there are going to be a lot of people in the viewing. So you can imagine, there is not much you can see and do in the property. Sometimes there are people still staying in the house so it’s very strange to intrude on other people’s house. The whole aim of the visit is to check that the house looks like what it is on the pictures. Most of the time the picture has been cleaned up definitely looks better than in real life. Also, check some of the corners and hidden corners that’s not shown in pictures. Normally people ask how much is the maintenance fees, whether it is a rental unit and how much was the rent. This is because rents are controlled here and you cannot rent more than what was previously rented out for.

During the viewing, check out the neighbourhood. Look at the trash around the area which shows you how much the residents there care for their neighbourhood. We also looked out for boarded our houses or burnt out houses. Those are not good sign for a neighbourhood. Look at the park, see if it’s filled with laughing gas canisters and trash. See who is hanging out around that time.

Don’t imagine yourself living in the house yet, then you will get attached to the vision of the house and will have trouble detaching yourself in the bidding process. The whole goal is to see if the house is as advertised.

The situation in Ireland

With the shortage of homes for sale, Ireland is unique among the world where you would bid for property and the one with the highest bid will get the property. Normally it is the other way around where the seller provides a price and buyer tries to bargain down the price. So the situation provides a unique challenge when buying house in Ireland, where all it matters is how much money you have. Typically people pay between 10%-20% on top of the asking price, but all depends on the interest and bidding.

Due to the competitive situation in Ireland to buy a house, the whole process is rather stressful.

There are some government websites you can visit to see how much properties has been sold for in the past such as Property Services Regulatory Authority and Property Price Register . This would give a good baseline on how much you should budget to pay for properties in that area. You can also see how much the property that you are bidding for was previously transacted. We did notice that the price went up month by month in 2022-2024. It became hard to predict how much people would pay for a property that we are interested in.

The bidding process

At the end of the viewing, the agent will then tell you how to put in your bids. Most of the time they would ask you to email them and all the bids are done through emails. It’s a slow process thought. Some of them have online bid systems where you can see how many bidders and how much they are bidding. There are many techniques people share on how to beat the system but ultimately, whoever willing to pay more gets the property.

The agents also have different ways of ending the bids. One way is called the blind bid, where the agent will ask everyone to put in their last bid by a certain time. This is the tough one to beat as you don’t know how much the other bidders will put in their blind bid. We figured this was only used when they wanted to close the bids fast. We only experience request for blind bids once. Most of the time the agent will push for people to bid till everyone pulled out except one.

Our strategy

When we first bidding on the first few houses, we had a had a number in our head on how much we are willing to pay for the house. It’s an arbitrary number we put in based on the property price website. We would then bid up to what we are willing to pay for and then pull out. We kept to our comfort level when it comes to the price. From the first houses we bid for and see how much the bids go, we learned that we need to adjust our expectations for how much a price cost. Anything 10%-20% on top of the asking price is expected, aiming for 15%. It all depends on how we felt about the house when visiting.

There is no strategy to the how much to increment the bids. Most of the time we went up €2000 every bid. There was once or twice we bit in increments of €10,000 to throw off the bulk of bidders when we see the property is way below our budget. Once it hits our target budget, we sometimes put in up to €5000 more to see if it sticks. We don’t want to lose out on a bid for a few thousand more especially if there’s only 2 bidders in the race. Sometimes you can see that the competing bidder has lost steam when they take longer to update their bids and their increment value is getting smaller.

We looked out at a larger are to buy, therefore giving us more options. The priority is distance to schools and we set ourselves 1/2 hour drive to schools. I was told when we came here in 2022 that it is normal for people to drive half hour to drop their children to schools. We had a few areas in mind and we bid for all the properties that came in the market in those areas. The more we bid, the more we learned the system and hedge our bets. Our goal is to take the first property that we got.

North Dublin is known for some areas of crime. After visiting a few houses, we made a mental note on where some areas looks sketchy. Despite the cheap property price, we did not consider those areas. We also looked at a few cheap and nice areas but roads accessibility was a problem. There was a place where we took more than an hour to reach although it looked near as there were few traffic bottle neck.

Some Crazy Stories

Although we said that normally the person with the most money gets the house, it’s not normally the case.

We lost one property although we were one of the top bidders as the seller wanted to close the sale fast. One of the bidders were cash buyers so they got the property instead. We really loved this property, it is move in condition and some renovations has been done to expand the loving space of the house. We just have to move on after that.

There as then another property, bidding came to just 2 parties. The estate agent has been pushing us to put in our final bids almost every week. But every time there was a new bid, he kept it going. I was at the top end of the budget and going for one last bid. Then suddenly a 3rd bidder came in on top of us out of nowhere. We pulled out and moved on. Surprisingly after a couple of months, the estate agent called us back to ask if wanted the property. Apparently the top bidder who came in late is moving out of the country and didn’t want to proceed. Seems the other bidder that was with me also pulled out. We were told we could cut our offer by €20,000 and still get the property as the others were way below what we had offered.

Finally, there was one apartment we were bidding where the top bidder pulled out. I was not sure what was the reason. We were then offered the place at the price we bid for, which was not a lot. I felt this was a pretty cheap property. Alas we already moved on and got something else at that time.

Final Encouraging Words

At this time, buying a property is a bid deal and a huge achievement for anyone in Ireland. As with anything in life, I learned a lot from the bids that we failed. It was mostly a mindset change for us, on how much we think a property costs. At the end, I felt the strategy that worked is to bid many properties and keep trying. The highest bidders not necessary will get the property and there are times when people pull out from the bid.