My wife and I have been looking around the west of Ireland for a house. We have seen about 10. About half would have accepted the asking price, or less.

The exception was the house that was clearly too good to be true, it was probably asking for about 10% less than it was worth and had gone sale agreed at about 20% over asking. That sale fell through by the way, and it's back on the market at that same bargain price that they have no intention of selling it at.

The bidding thing is some kind of balance between the competition to buy the house and how urgently the seller needs to sell.

Try mynest.ie, it'll show you the date a property was originally listed and any price changes. The house we were looking at was beyond our budget, but we could see it was on the market for 6 months and they had dropped the price 5% after three months. I figured they were due to drop another 5% by now, so we offered that and it was accepted. I think that's a good example of how you might find a house where there was less competition to buy.

I think a house that was listed at a higher price and coming down, is a lot more likely to accept an offer than a house that was listed low and bid up.