sid wrote:

Broadback had written:
Looking for something else I see that the legal beagles are looking into
the Scottish system. I'd always thought that it was superior to our
English one, but it seems that estate agents have started to utilise a
flaw in it to up house prices. They simply advertise the house as
offers over £X when the property is worth at least £2X, there is such a
rush for the property that people end up paying £2X+.

The Scottish bidding system is "blind" so there's no way to get into a
direct counter-bidding war. What the artificially low "offers-over"
price does is to greatly increase everyone's uncertainty about how much
to bid, in the hope that the high bids will go higher still.

In rural areas the overbid factor is nothing like as high as 2, but the
infection is spreading...

As sid says:
its up to the potential buyer to figure out what the property is worth
to him/her.

If you've set your sights on one particular property, you'll want to be
sure that yours is the highest bid, so you'll almost certainly have to
offer more than you feel it's "really" worth. In practice, it's much
more about deciding what your spending limit is, and sticking to it.

I still think that the system of making up your mind time and making a
legally binding offer stops most of the abuses of the English system

To clarify that: once the vendor has decided to accept someone's offer -
including the price, but also any other conditions that have been
mutually agreed - it then becomes a legally binding contract to sell and
to buy.

That's the good part of the Scottish system; the less good part is the
blind bidding process by which you get there.


--
Ian White