A house enters the market, being listed by a realtor and entered into Hemnet. Hemnet is the site that has all the home listings in Sweden, and is by my guesstimate almost as popular as Facebook. In the listing, two scheduled open houses are announced, usually the first being on a weekend and the second being a week night the week after. Our house had it's first open house on Sunday August 18th and the second on Tuesday August 20th. The open houses are only scheduled for 30 minutes and are usually jam packed. There were 40+ families at the first and 20+ families at the second open house of our house. This was busier than any of the other 4 open houses we had been to.
Usually on the day after the second open house, the bidding starts. For our house, there was already one bid at the starting price that was given at the second open house. First thing the next morning, I called in our first bid and we were assigned the ID "Bidder #2". Immediately the bidding took off. The bidding is open, meaning all bidders, and really anyone who cares to look, can see the current highest bid and all the bid history online. Anyone who left their phone number at the open house, get text messages for each new bid that comes in. In some cases the actual bids are placed by text message, but our realtor wanted you to actually call him, when placing a bid. By 3pm on the first day of bidding, there were 6 bidders, a total of 20 bids placed and the price was up over 33%. Shortly after that the bidding started to slow down. We had the highest bid over the first night, and thought that maybe, maybe this was it.
Sure enough, the next morning, the bidding continued. Not quite as aggressively, and it seemed like there were only 3 bidders left in the game. Throughout the day, the bidding crawled. The other bidders seemed to take their time... this is a sign of them having to think over/scavenge for more money, for every bid. Our strategy however, was to be aggressive. Always up the last bid as fast as we could, and with the same amount. Making it seem like we were nowhere near our limit and they might as well give up.
Day three of bidding was just one other bidder and us. Bids in the morning were placed fast, but then it got quiet. After a few hours of silence, we thought we had won. I called the realtor around 3 pm to ask what was going on. He told me the other bidder were needing to think, but they were going to place another bid. Apparently, they were already over their limit, but still wanted the house so bad. This made us nervous, since at this point we were very close to our limit. And then the bid came in. We raised ours. They raised theirs. Their new bid was the limit that we had set. However, we figured this was probably their limit too. What gave it away, was that they had raised their bid twice as much this time. We decided to place one final bid, just to see if they actually had reached their limit. Silence. And then the realtor called. The other bidder had asked to think over the weekend. The realtor had told them, we had agreed on getting this over with that day. They had to give up.
After 35 bids and 52% increase in price, we won the bidding war. I have to add that this was quite extreme. Most houses on the market has 2 to 4 bidders and the price increases about 30%. In our case, the starting price was set way too low. This is a common technique to draw a lot of interest. We could tell that the house was severely under priced and were expecting the price that we ended up winning it for.
The whole bidding experience was very stressful and is not something we wish to go through again. The fact is, you never know from a house listing, if you will be able to afford the house. It all depends on the bidders in a sellers market.
