According to this, reported in the Gulf Times (but first printed in the Evening Standard), London home-buyers are gazumping themselves, in a new tactic known as super-gazumping:
The practice involves buyers topping their own offers after a sealed-bid auction to make sure they end up as the winners. The increased offer, which the agent is obliged to put to the vendor, is sometimes accompanied by a large sum of money to demonstrate the bidder means business.
The story is one of hysterical cash buyers, panicking that the longer they wait the more their cash is being devalued against a rampant property market. Suzanne Gary, of Ludlow Thompson, says the agency has 27 buyers chasing each available property. But the Rat and Mouse award for the most elegant comment on super-gazumping goes to Douglas & Gordon, Chelsea's Ed Mead:
It is the opposite of buyer's remorse.
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