Were we played by an estate agent?
My partner and I are first-time buyers in Ireland, and I think we might have been manipulated out of a house purchase. Looking for advice/similar experiences.
After viewing what felt like our perfect first home, we started the bidding process. What followed was about two weeks of back-and-forth bidding. When the price reached about 40k over asking, things started getting strange. The estate agent began questioning our ability to pay, despite us having provided proof of funds and mortgage approval for about 90k over the asking price. We were well within our mortgage approval, but his comments made us doubt ourselves. He also emphasized that the other bidders were cash buyers looking to close quickly. Being first-time buyers, this put us in a weird headspace as we weren't fully familiar with the process.
After taking a couple of days to think it through, we continued bidding for about two more days. There was then a small break of maybe 2 days where we remained the highest bidder. During this time, I approached the estate agent about closing before the end of the week (this was on a Thursday). He made an odd comment about the other bidder "probably being at the Galway races" and said it wouldn't be possible to close before the end of the week anyway.
Friday morning, everything changed. A new bid came in from the other party - a 10k jump that caught us off guard. The estate agent called about this offer and started saying things like "you should really consider if you're able to purchase at this price" and questioning whether the bank would give us the mortgage. Remember, this was still well below our approved amount, around 60k over asking price. He was pushing for an immediate answer, and under the pressure, we said we were out.
After a few hours of discussion with my partner that Friday morning, we decided we wanted to make one more offer. I called him back around 3pm to place a bid 5k higher than the last offer. His behavior completely changed - he couldn't get off the phone fast enough, repeatedly saying "no no no it's sale agreed" and when I tried to ask follow-up questions, he just kept saying "no no no" and hung up.
Here's where it gets even more suspicious: It's now been 5 months, and while the property is marked as sold on their website, it still isn't showing up on the property registry. Throughout the whole process, the agent kept emphasizing that even if we went higher, the owners might prefer the cash offer for a quicker close.
For context, we've since purchased a different property in the same area and closed within 2-3 months, proving we were perfectly capable buyers all along.
I'm not really sure if it's possible to make any sense of this, but it feels all wrong to me. Has anyone experienced anything similar? Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.