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 are not many places we can go to see houses. Most properties are posted on daft.ie or myhome.ie. The key is to make sure that you search for homes that are newly posted, typically within the week. The time between posting, viewing and closing bids could be within 2-3 weeks. If you see a house that has been listed for 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, the first step is to contact the estate agent and ask when the viewing is. Sometimes the viewing is by appointment only. They only take bids if you have already seen the house, so make sure you attend 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 that there will be a lot of people at the viewing. So, as you can imagine, there isn’t much you can see or do in the property. Sometimes there are people still living in the house, so it’s very strange to intrude on someone else’s home. The whole aim of the visit is to check that the house looks like it does in the pictures. Most of the time, the pictures have been cleaned up and definitely look better than in real life. Also, check some of the corners and hidden areas that aren’t shown in the pictures. Normally, people ask how much the maintenance fees are, whether it is a rental unit, and how much the rent was. This is because rents are controlled here and you cannot rent it out for more than it was previously rented for.

During the viewing, check out the neighbourhood. Look at the trash around the area, which shows you how much the residents care for their neighbourhood. We also looked out for boarded-up houses or burnt-out houses. Those are not a good sign for a neighbourhood. Look at the park and 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, as you will get attached to the vision of the house and have trouble detaching yourself during 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 in that you bid for a property, and whoever has the highest bid gets it. Normally it is the other way around, where the seller sets a price and the buyer tries to bargain it down. So the situation provides a unique challenge when buying a house in Ireland, where all that matters is how much money you have. Typically, people pay between 10%-20% on top of the asking price, but it all depends on the interest and bidding.

Due to the competitive nature of buying a house in Ireland, the whole process is rather stressful.

There are some government websites you can visit to see how much properties have 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 you are bidding for was previously sold for. 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 we were 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 though. 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 is 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 experienced a request for a blind bid once. Most of the time the agent will push for people to bid until everyone pulls out except one.

Our strategy

When we first started bidding on the first few houses, we had a number in our head for how much we were 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 were willing to pay and then pull out. We kept to our comfort level when it came to the price. From the first few houses we bid on and seeing how high the bids went, we learned that we needed to adjust our expectations of what a property would 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 real strategy to how much we increment the bids. Most of the time we went up €2000 with every bid. There were once or twice when we bid in increments of €10,000 to throw off the bulk of bidders when we saw that the property was 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 are 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 at a larger area to buy, which gave us more options. The priority was distance to schools, and we set ourselves a half-hour drive limit to schools. I was told when we came here in 2022 that it is normal for people to drive half an hour to drop their children off at school. We had a few areas in mind and bid on all the properties that came onto the market in those areas. The more we bid, the more we learned the system and hedged 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 look sketchy. Despite the cheap property prices, we did not consider those areas. We also looked at a few cheap and nice areas, but road accessibility was a problem. There was a place that took us more than an hour to reach, even though it looked close, because of a few traffic bottlenecks.

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 was a cash buyer, so they got the property instead. We really loved this property; it was in move-in condition, and some renovations had been done to expand the living space of the house. We just had to move on after that.

There was then another property where the bidding came down to just 2 parties. The estate agent had 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 my budget and went 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 we wanted the property. Apparently, the top bidder who came in late was moving out of the country and didn’t want to proceed. It seems the other bidder who 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 on where the top bidder pulled out. I was not sure what the reason was. 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 had already moved on and found something else by that time.

Final Encouraging Words

At this time, buying a property is a big deal and a huge achievement for anyone in Ireland. As with anything in life, I learned a lot from the bids we lost. It was mostly a mindset change for us in how much we thought a property should cost. In the end, I felt the strategy that worked was to bid on many properties and keep trying. The highest bidder does not necessarily get the property, and there are times when people pull out of the bidding.