How the hell do you buy a house these days?

For context we have never brought a house before on market and brought our current place 13 years ago off market, we have been paying this joint down and saving our penny's in the hope to move to a better area and are finally in a really good place to buy.

We have since been looking for the past two months and fallen in love with three places in that time, trouble is we literally don't get a look in! All three times we have put an offer in 40k over asking and everytime we have got a message from the agent along the lines of "We have had an offer above the owners expectations, so they have decided to settle someone else's offer"

No negotiations or "Is this your best offer", just straight up sold! So my question for people that have brought recently, are we offering to little over? Should we be taking the asking price and adding another 100k?

I knew the market was bad but this next level.