Tommy Barker: Online bidding for a home in Ireland now feels like a gamble

AI's digital revolution is making home-hunting more stressful than ever, as online bidding platforms and rapid changes impact buyers' mental health.

Even if there was a home in the wings for everyone in need, the actual buying process remains an unnecessary tangle of hurdles, delays, and challenges, not least of which is stress.

Artifical intelligence and the digital revolution impacts every facet of societal and personal life, from work patterns to social engagements, dating, dining, distractions, diversions — and home-hunting.

Onlining and with an app for just about everything, with addiction-adjacent algorithms whirring in the background, the speed with which it’s embedded in our psyches is dizzying: little wonder that just as physical chores can be eased or even eliminated, impacts on mental health and soaring stress levels are only starting to be assessed.

“We felt like a gun was being put to our heads,” a couple confided to this columnist late last week while they were bidding online on a property they hoped to trade down to.

Four days later, an ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) report chimed exactly with their experience, noting 80% of those who had bought a home in the past three years found the process stressful and that some of the processes such as open auctions and online bidding platforms are also leading to inflated prices.

(Granted, 100% of people who have unsuccessfully attempted to buy a home, or the tens of thousands who are homeless and hopeless in the face of this country’s housing crisis find their experiences far more stressful....)

Even if there was a home in the wings for everyone in need, the actual buying process remains an unnecessary tangle of hurdles, delays, and challenges, not least of which is stress.

Traditionally, houses sold either by private treaty, or public auction, the former slower, the latter very much ‘in the moment’.

An evolving process aimed at increasing transparency and streamlining and speeding up the sales process is outpacing conveyancing delivery and consumer protection legislation.

The plethora of platforms which have emerged over the past decade can and does leave prospective buyers flummoxed, given the span from auction-oriented sites such as BidX1, Iamsold, and Offr, to those such as Youbid and Bidnow, with variations thereof, as well as the ability to track bids on property portals such as Daft.

A number of larger agents such as REA and Sherry FitzGerald (via their mysherryfitz) also have refined their own range of ways to engage with home hunters/bidders, spanning old school in-person conversations, phone calls, texts, emails or, increasingly, digitally, via screens.

All of it is stressful.

The couple mentioned above found their online portal engagement stressful, able to track their goal on an agent’s own portal as having a measure of transparency greater than in ‘the old days’, yet not fully so. They queried how agents can take assurances from rival bidders as to their status, such as mortgage approved, cash buyers or in a chain, yet not having to verify until being at the end of the bidding process.

“It was private treaty, but felt way more like an auction. It was like the process was taking on a life of its own,” especially when an email would ping in and says baldly “you have been outbid on XXX,” they say.

They held back on immediately raising their bid, as the property in question began to go €100,000 or 20% over the initial asking price (AMV) in bids among four or five parties in the space of a week.

A comparison with gambling, and especially online gambling, is apt?

There’s the temptation to go one more roll of the dice, to get lucky, to make good losses, to reverse fortunes, to go home laughing … shiver, the main difference being the sheer scale of the sums involved, in a property purchase, give or take a half a million euro for a home.

Notably, the number of sales far in excess of asking prices was the subject of another very recent insightful report by Myhome /Bank of Ireland, one in 10 going 10% over, one in seven going 20% over their guides.

Both that Myhome/BofI survey, and a 2025 report from the Consumer and Competition Protection Commissioners (CCPC) have highlighted how intending home buyers are unhappy with transparency levels in the process, and the clearly proactive CCPC has a very useful homebuyer’s guide on its own website.

THE level of scrutiny into Ireland’s flawed, and evolving property transactions process is to be welcomed: it’s driving demand for even greater transparency, such as calls from auctioneers’ body IPAV to bring forward the Seller’s Legal Pack for Property Buyers Bill 2021 to speed up conveyancing, the legal transfer of property title; to have government and relevant State bodies urgently introduce a long-promised eConveyancing system, and agreeing with the CCPC, and the ESRI, on the creation of a profession of conveyancer as already in existence in other common law countries.

This week’s latest spotlight saw the CCPC funding the ESRI Behavioural Research Unit report which includes valuable behavioural science insight, putting air on concepts such as ‘auction-fever’; ‘loss aversion’; ‘anchoring’;’ sunk-cost fallacy’ and risky decision making (see esri.ie, and ccpc.ie websites for a deeper dive on these.)

The joint empirical, data-driven, practical and even provocative report builds on a previous, more theoretical, report from the ESRI in October 2025, with real behavioural evidence based on 800 surveys.

Adding one more experience to that 800, this property columnist’s entirely unscientific interaction with the relocating/trade-down home-hunting couple mentioned above, (No 801?!) saw them make one final offer early this week, up against a vendor-imposed deadline, with all bidders said to be cash buyers.

It was well in excess of the sum they’d set as their limit when first deciding to go for the property.

They were unlucky.

However, instead of getting the triggering “you have been outbid” email this time, they were told that the seller had decided to sell to a more local bidder, with a younger family, and for a slightly lower sum.

Hearing that rare example of decency considerably eased their disappointment in losing out in the widely-acknowledged stressful process of home hunting — which for them will only start up all over again this new selling season, not much older, but a good bit wiser.