Dummy bidding is when an auctioneer takes bids from a person who does not intend to buy the property for sale in order to get interested parties up to the price that their vendor is happy to sell the property for. In the past they typically had a person in the crowd who would bid until or just before the proerty hit its reserve price at which point they would stop bidding. In the past few years new laws have come into effect to try and stop the auctioneer from using a person in the crowd to make false bids. This has led to the introduction of vendor bids. These are bids that are made on behalf of the vendor by the auctioneer. The theory behind this is that people know that they are bidding against the vendor.
What some agents are now doing is having dummy interested parties when a property gets passed in. So if you are at an auction and the property is passed in to you be cautious if they say that there are other interested people
