New real estate platform offers an alternative to blind bidding

The conventional wisdom in real estate is that blind bidding is never going away, despite strong opposition to the practice, because of a simple assertion: they work.

“For my entire career we’ve been handcuffed doing blind bidding,” Adam Nadler, a realtor with Royal LePage Your Community Realty in Richmond Hill, Ont. The theory goes that if buyers have to jump into a pool with no information other than the number of other registered bids they will all make their maximum offer – and perhaps overpay – gaining the seller the best possible price. It has been such a strongly held view that, until this year, the laws governing Ontario realtors wouldn’t even allow them to share details of competing bids. “Buyers were bidding against themselves, and that becomes a really big issue,” said Mr. Nadler.