Owning your own home

I'll be gutted to go way over what the other potential buyer offers, but also gutted to miss out on the property if I go too low.
... any wisdom to impart?

Only that a sealed-bid second-price auction should be revenue-equivalent (to the sealed-bit first price version) and specifically avoids the fear of over-bidding and all the second-guessing around that.

I don't know what the odds are that estate agents are keen on auction theory, though.

I don’t see how that’s different, ultimately it’s all bidding against other buyers competitively. Just bid what you think it’s worth to you.

Tell them to fuck off, private bidding. People get too attached to houses that isnt there and people selling sometimes know this and want to push on it.

At the end of the day its yous that's gotta stump up the extra, just dont go mental for something that you might be over paying for.

and the estate agent has now come back and said they'll do closed private bidding between us and the other potential buyer, and the highest wins

And then when the estate agent is phoning the loser to tell them that they've lost they'll say something along the lines of "you're only a few thousand too low - are you sure you can't go higher?".

Leave your bid as it stands. They're just trying to extract ever greater quantities of money.

A third vote for telling them to fuck off - it's literally purely designed to extract the maximum from you, and you've already bid what you're happy with ('happy'...)

We did this for our current house. It was marketed way too low, there was a huge amount of interest and it went to closed bids.

It was the perfect house in the perfect road for us and we decided on a price that we were happy to pay. We didn't make it a round multiple of 5 or 10. In my mind that made it more likely to win if some had offered say 100k or 105k as we would have had 101 or 106k (for example).

We won and were over the moon despite paying over the odds. 6yrs on the house is worth much more than that anyway now (that may not be the case if buying now though).

It's too late to tell you this but going in 10k above from the off was pretty punchy unless it is a fairly high value house.

In these situations in the past I've topped my offer up by 2k as a gesture of goodwill whilst also explaining my previous offer was at the top of my affordability.

In this situation I probably wouldn't tell them to fo actually because 1) it's an open goal for your opponent and 2) they might think you are a pain in the arse to deal with.

What you now need to flush out is whether the other guy wants it more than you. I'd probably top it up by an obscure offer by something like £2,250.

If the other guy offers another ten then they want it more than you but it'll be bitter sweet as you've just cost them 20k odd than they thought they were getting it for a few days ago.

Good luck the whole process is a shit show presided over by cunts without any sort of ethical compass.