Owning your own home

However I'm massively suspicious about the whole situ and feel like we're being squeezed. If the fourth offer on our purchase had been higher than ours, wouldn't the agent have invited us to negotiate rather than jump to best & final? Another concern is that b&f is so aggressive it may turn off some of our prospects - one has already cancelled a viewing.

From my experience you are right to be suspicious. Been to best and finals a few times now with some really dubious scenarios. Once we were bidding against one other couple. They were cash buyers (so generally favourable) but we were the highest bidder. They asked us to bid again because there wasn't much in it. So we did and they went for the cash buyers anyway. Bled another £8k out of the cash buyers in the process.

Similar thing happened another time except the cash buyers were already the highest bidder (cue speil from estate agent about us being first time buyers and how attractive that was...) and they wanted to give us another go. Obvz they went for the cash buyer anyway.

tl;dr - There are some really cunty estate agents out there.