The Ghost Bidding Myth: What 20,000 Irish Property Sales Actually Show

Every Irish home buyer has a bidding-war story. A property goes sale-agreed the day it's listed. A phantom other bidder keeps nudging the price up by €5,000 on a Friday evening. Someone's cousin lost out at €40,000 over asking in Drumcondra. It has become the central narrative of the Irish property market.

We pulled 20,801 Property Price Register sales matched to their original listing asking prices from the last two years. The data tells a different story — and it's the one you'd actually want to know before you bid.

Finding #1 — 41% of sales close at or below asking

Three of the four largest bars in the chart are on the left-hand side of the distribution. Add them up: 40.7% of matched sales close at or below the asking price. Not in a bidding war. Not over asking. The buyer paid the asking price or less.

This is the opposite of what the cultural narrative claims. If “every property is a bidding war,” the left-hand side of this chart should be tiny. It's the biggest part of the distribution.

Finding #2 — 11% close at exactly the asking price

The single biggest spike in the distribution is “exactly 0%” — the property sold for precisely what the agent asked for. Not €500 more. Not €5,000 more. The exact number on the listing.

This matters because it is statistically unusual. In a truly competitive bidding process, landing on the exact asking price to the euro is rare. Bids come in at round numbers (€505,000, €510,000); counter-bids push over. The probability of the final sale equalling the asking price exactly would be small under a genuine bidding-war model.

The “exactly at asking” spike is 3.7× higher than the “just over asking” band (0.001–1%). 2,259 sales closed at exactly asking; only 614 closed between 0 and 1% over. That's a discontinuity. The simplest explanation: the agent received a single good offer at the asking price, the seller accepted it, and no real competing bidder appeared. The transaction was clean.

This is good news if you're buying. In roughly one in nine transactions, offering the asking price is the winning offer — no drama, no escalation. The narrative pushes you to bid high preemptively; the data says you shouldn't.

Finding #3 — above €400k, the median sale closes at asking

Break the data by asking-price band and the story gets sharper:

In every price band from €400k upwards — which is the bulk of the Irish family-home market — the median sale closes at exactly the asking price and over half close at or below. The bidding-war narrative describes the under-€400k market with some accuracy. Above €400k, it is substantially wrong.

Finding #4 — bidding wars are real, but small and concentrated

Real bidding wars do exist. The right-hand tail of the chart is substantial: 9.8% of sales close more than 20% over asking, and a further 6.2% close 15–20% over. Call it 16% of the market where the final sale is dramatically above the asking price.

But look at where that tail concentrates. From our earlier analysis of area-level premiums: in Maynooth, Celbridge, and Leixlip, 87% of sales close above asking. In Dublin 4, only 53% do and the median premium is +0.6%. Bidding-war intensity is a local phenomenon, not a national one. In specific hot areas — the commuter belt, regional cities with employment growth, and properties under €200k where investors compete with first-time buyers — the competition is real and substantial.

So — ghost bidding. Is it happening?

This is where we need to be careful. Ghost bidding — where an estate agent invents or misrepresents a competing bid to push up the sale price — is illegal in Ireland under the Property Services Regulatory Authority's code of conduct. It is also notoriously difficult to prove, because the “other bidder” is usually only communicated verbally or by text.

Our data cannot prove ghost bidding. We don't see the bid history — only the asking price and the final sale price. What we can say is what the data pattern is consistent with:

• The large “exactly at asking” spike is consistent with honest transactions — many sales complete with no competing bid at all, or with the agent simply accepting the first offer.
• The fat tail above 15% over asking could be genuine competition — multiple well-funded buyers chasing scarce supply in a hot area. It could also include some inflated bids. The data alone cannot distinguish the two.
• The pattern most consistent with systematic ghost bidding — a fat spike at 2–5% over asking, where agents nudge prices up just enough to profit without losing the buyer — is not visible in the overall data. The “2–3%” and “3–5%” bands are 4.2% and 7.0% of the market respectively; not especially elevated versus neighbouring bands.

If ghost bidding were systemic across the Irish market, we would expect to see a pronounced cluster at small positive premiums. We don't. Which is not the same as saying it doesn't happen — only that the overall distribution is not strongly distorted by it.

Where ghost-bidding suspicion is most warranted is in the specific hot areas and the 20%+ tail — places where there is real competition and where inventing one extra bidder could materially lift the final price. That's a pattern our data is consistent with, but not one our data alone can prove.

What this means if you're buying

• Don't preemptively bid over asking. 41% of matched sales close at or below asking. In the €400k+ market, the median buyer gets the property for the asking price. The default assumption that “you must bid high to be in the running” is wrong for most of the market.
• Know your area before you bid. In Maynooth you probably will be in a bidding war. In Dublin 4 you probably won't. Use our area-level premium-over-asking data to set expectations.
• If the agent tells you there's another bidder, ask them to put it in writing. A legitimate competing bid can be confirmed in an email. An invented one usually can't. The Property Services Regulatory Authority has jurisdiction if you can evidence misrepresentation.
• Offering the asking price is a valid strategy.It wins ~11% of transactions outright, before any negotiation starts. In the €400k+ market it wins more than half of them.

How we did this

Data sources: Property Price Register (all residential sales flagged as at full market price) matched to their original property listing asking prices via address normalisation and fuzzy match (Jaro-Winkler threshold 0.85). Filters: sale and asking price between €50k and €5m; sale date between Oct 2023 and Apr 2026; sales flagged as not-full-market-price excluded. Total matched sample: 20,801 transactions in the overall distribution; 21,292 in the price-band breakdown (identical filter with the wider €50k–€5m asking-band cut-off). Premium = (sale − asking) / asking × 100. Medians are used throughout in preference to means to avoid trophy-sale skew. This analysis observes the distribution of final outcomes; it does not observe the bid history between listing and sale.