Shane Timmins

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66 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Shane Timmins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Today with David McCullagh · Clamping down on gazumping · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

So we ran a study for the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

We published it back in February.

And in that, we saw that just under a third of potential homebuyers expect something to come into play.

And they do indeed favour more transparent bidding systems.

So when we asked people about their preferences for how bids should be run,

Over half of potential buyers favoured online bidding systems.

So there are these systems that you can see where you enter your bid, you can see the number of other bidders and the history of bids and so on.

But our evidence suggests that we would urge some caution here with these systems.

So as part of the study, we ran a short experiment comparing behaviour on their different bidding systems.

So we compared that online bidding system to a mock estate agent system that people might be a bit more familiar with to a mock sealed bid system.

So that's where all potential buyers put in one single offer.

They're blind to the offers of others and the seller then chooses one of those.

So that's a much more common system in Scotland.

So looking at the behaviour side of it, rather than what people say they prefer, the sealed bids actually pushed house prices up about half the rate of the other bidding systems.

So those online bidding systems and the estate agent system led to higher prices for buyers and it pushed them above their ideal budget.

Yeah, and there's a lot of psychological reasons for this, actually.

So we've got evidence for issues like auction fever.

So when people get into that kind of competitive state, in particular with systems like that online bidding system and the estate agent systems, there's a period of time where someone has put in the highest bid, they feel like they have the house now.

until someone else comes along and puts in another bid.

So you experience what we would call loss aversion.

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