Hidden Costs buying at Auction - Buyers Premium

Doozergirl

That almost sounds like the sort of people that promise to buy your house at below value, flipping the sale straight on for pure profit with the contract transferred on? 

We used to buy at auctions quite a bit 10-15 years ago and it wasn't the same; we almost always just paid our own fees plus the search pack or something relatively innocuous.   We bought a few months back through Bond Wolfe and had to pay pretty much all the fees and that was a genuine vendor.  It added over 5% to our bid.  Fine, if you're prepared, you just have to work backwards on your bid price. It does irk as I suspect it is there to catch people
out. 

Slithery

Doozergirl said:

We used to buy at auctions quite a bit 10-15 years ago and it wasn't the same; we almost always just paid our own fees plus the search pack or something relatively innocuous.   We bought a few months back through Bond Wolfe and had to pay pretty much all the fees and that was a genuine vendor.  It added over 5% to our bid.  Fine, if you're prepared, you just have to work backwards on your bid price. It does irk as I suspect it is there to catch people out. 

Indeed.

My only auction purchase was a few years ago and the fees came to around 8% which included the sellers solicitors fees, land registration, auction fees, title insurance, searches and pretty much everything else they could think of to try and add on (it was a low value piece of land though so the fees would necessarily make up a higher %). Most of the other properties in the auction had similar conditions.

Although to be fair this was all made clear in the documents freely downloaded from the auctioneers before I decided to look at the place seriously. If you don't do that sort of basic research before going to an auction then you deserve what you end up with...