Writing a column every week for the best part of a decade, I will admit that sometimes
Writing a column every week for the best part of a decade, I will admit that sometimes it takes some thinking to find a topic that hasn’t already been covered and where I might genuinely be able to share something helpful. Colour me grateful then to be called up earlier this week by someone worried about something they’d heard: that sellers will soon be legally required to have a building and pest inspection report prepared before going to market and having to provide this to any prospective buyer. Let me stop that one right there – that’s not true. To (mis)quote Mean Girls: “That’s not a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing.”
What IS a thing, is that from the 1st August 2025 (less than 2 months away), a new Seller Disclosure regime in Queensland will require all sales contracts to be issued with an additional disclosure statement, with potential termination rights for failure to provide this before signing.
While some of the early proposals around seller disclosure were overwhelming – including suggestions that you would need to engage a solicitor to prepare the documents, and that sellers might need to provide exhaustive details – what’s landed is still a meaningful change, but far more practical. It’s certainly a long way from the pretty onerous requirements in NSW and other jurisdictions.
The new disclosure (the Form 2) can be as little as seven pages, and rather than requiring you to disclose what at times felt like everything (including a house’s height, weight and favourite colour), it’s limited to more reasonable questions such as current property zoning, whether there has been any owner-builder work completed, whether the property is on the Heritage Register, and what the typical Council and water rates charges are.
This document can be prepared by an owner, their agent or their solicitor. It must be signed by the seller and provided to a buyer before a contract is entered into. It also has to be made available in the case of an auction, so that buyers have all the relevant info upfront.
As an agent who was pretty delighted with the simplifications that came to contracts way back in 2014 with the Property Occupations Act, while this is more paperwork, its far more benevolent than it might have been, and helps to clarify a few points that should be genuinely helpful to buyers (and the agent selling). Unlike a vendor statement (in NSW and VIC), this is far from exhaustive though, so curious buyers should definitely not rest on this as doing their job for them, and still conduct any other prudent searches on their property purchase.
Tom Quaid is the REIQ Zone Chair for Cairns