A sweeping 20-year study of nearly 14 million US home sales found that buyers who win bidding wars tend to overpay and underperform financially. Natthawadee - stock.adobe.com

Winning isn’t everything.

A sweeping study examining nearly 14 million home sales across 30 states over the past two decades found that homebuyers who triumph in bidding wars — those who get that house they so badly want — often face a costly downside.

According to the research reported in Fortune , those who pay above asking price — a hallmark of competitive offers — tend to overpay by roughly 8% and later see diminished returns when they sell.

On average, these buyers’ annual returns were 1.3 percentage points lower than those who avoided bidding wars.

Over a typical 6.3-year ownership span, that gap transla

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