09-04-2025
‘We bought a two-bed London property for £250k – and made £150k profit'
Collette MacSwiney was stuck on the idea of buying her first home in London. It is where she grew up, where she works and where her friends and family live – but her budget of £250,000 wasn't going to cut it.
'I was 25 by the time I graduated university and I didn't want to rent anywhere, so I lived at home with my parents in north London,' says MacSwiney, 29, who works in insurance.
'I started looking at properties but my limit wasn't getting me anything or anywhere close to where I wanted to buy. I wanted somewhere that wasn't two buses and a train ride to work.'
She looked into the shared ownership scheme, where you buy part of a property and rent the rest, but decided it wasn't for her. In the end, her mum suggested she try an auction.
Bidding for a property is relatively simple – whoever offers the highest amount wins. Any property can be sold via auction, but there is typically a reason that it has not been put on the regular market, such as needing vast renovations or having a tenant in situ.
They are often good value for money, but can come with risks and nuances. There may be extra fees or a deadline for completion. And because auction properties are sold 'as seen', you are legally bound to purchase once the hammer falls – regardless of any nasty surprises.
This didn't faze MacSwiney. After weeks of finding only houses with triangle-shaped rooms or corridors masquerading as a one-bed flats, she spotted a two-bedroom property in Willesden Green, north-west London. There was only one photograph of the outside of the building and a floorplan, but it fit the bill. The starting price was about £150,000.
'The outside was nothing special, but the flat was square with normal-shaped rooms,' says MacSwiney.
'We went to see it and it was pretty much as expected. The place was completely full of stuff and there were some weird decor choices – one of the rooms was completely pink with a large mural of Elsa from Frozen, for instance – but it didn't look like there were any structural issues.'
MacSwiney and her mum decided to take part in the auction as a trial, just to see how the process worked and check that they were happy to go down the auction route. They opened with a low bid of £250 over the starting price and then watched as the other 13 bidders pushed up the price. If someone's bid remained unchallenged for 60 seconds, that person had won the flat.
'When the price was approaching our budget, mum just said, 'let's put in our maximum and then someone will up it and we'll know we're out'. We pressed 'bid' and then just stared at the screen saying 'someone will swoop in now, surely someone will come in, please someone else bid', but no one did,' she says.
'The auction ended and we had won and I was suddenly thinking, 'wow, I guess I'm buying this flat'. But the stars aligned, because we couldn't have planned for how well it's all gone.'
While property auctions are typically thought of as the realm of investors and developers, MacSwiney is far from alone in using the process to buy her home.
According to Savills, the estate agent, opportunistic buyers – those not necessarily looking for a property but who spot a good deal – and those searching for a property for their own use now make up two in five of those heading to auctions. It's becoming increasingly popular, too, with the number of new bidders increasing by 133pc since 2021.
'We've seen a strong seam of demand in the auction market,' says Gary Murphy, of Savills. 'Online live-streamed auctions have continued to offer an accessible route to purchase.'
It's not only risk-takers entering the bidding wars, either. According to Savills, 58pc of those buying a home via auction said they would only bid when they were sure it represented 'fair value and minimal risk'.
And most of them are happy customers – once buyers have used the auction process to buy a property they are very likely to return, with 95pc saying they would buy at auction again.
This is certainly the case for Madeline Miller, who bought her first home in Manchester via auction after becoming disillusioned with the normal market when she was repeatedly outbid.
'We wanted a three-bedroom Victorian terrace filled with personality, but it's fiercely competitive and people frequently pay well over the listed price,' says Miller, 38, a tutor at UKWritings. 'It left us feeling completely disheartened.'
Spurred on by a friend, Miller and her husband began to research the process and signed in to watch some property auctions in action. Eventually, a Victorian terrace in the right location and within their budget went under the hammer. They bought it for £185,000, well below the going price for similar homes of £230,000.
'The auction was exhilarating and nerve-wracking,' she says. 'Our main worry was placing an excessive bid during the auction, so we set a strict maximum and stuck to it. I'd absolutely use the auction process again, as it offers fair pricing and removes uncertainty. We could also approach it with more confidence next time.
'We love the house. It's hard work, but it's been amazing turning it into a home.'
MacSwiney, who ended up buying the flat with her sister, Florence, 24, feels the same. It took a year and cost them nearly £100,000 to do up, but it is now completely refurbished.
'There was loads to do in the end,' she says. 'We had to completely empty the flat, which was packed. We threw away the sofa because it didn't have any cushions, but then we found them a few weeks later under a pile of stuff in the bedroom.
'We also thought we could keep the kitchen but then mum went to open a cupboard and the whole thing just fell on her, so we ended up gutting the place completely. The floorboards had all been taken up in my room and some weird polystyrene had been put down, so we ended up having to get all new floorboards.'
It was all worth it, though. Flats in the building typically sell for between £400,000 and £500,000, and new-build flats across the street are on sale for about £700,000. MacSwiney estimates that hers would go on the market for around half a million – a profit of £150,000.
'I do recognise I got quite lucky,' she adds. 'I don't think all auction stories necessarily go this well.'
