Queensland Auction Price Guide Rules: What Agents Absolutely Cannot Say to Bidders

A buyer at an open home pulls you aside and asks directly: “Mate, what’s this one going to sell for at auction?” It’s a reasonable question. The problem is that in Queensland, answering it — even casually, even with the best intentions — can expose you to a penalty exceeding $80,000. These are not theoretical risks confined to egregious conduct. The Queensland auction price guide rules affecting agents and bidders are precise, actively enforced, and routinely misunderstood.

Queensland’s approach is more restrictive than any other Australian state. Agents in Queensland are prohibited from representing a property for sale at a specified price while being aware the vendor will not accept that price, and if a property is going to auction, agents are banned from making any price guide representations at all. That prohibition is total. There is no “ballpark figure” exemption. There is no “off the record” carve-out. Understanding exactly where the line is drawn — and what you can legitimately say — is fundamental compliance knowledge for every licensed agent and salesperson working in this market.

The Legislative Foundation: Sections 214 to 216 of the Property Occupations Act 2014

In Queensland, the conduct of property auctions is regulated under the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) (the Act) and supporting regulations. The legislation applies to property agents, resident letting agents, auctioneers and their employees, and is designed to protect consumers.

The price guide prohibition sits across three key sections of that Act. Section 214 governs auctioneers. Section 215 governs how agents must handle price representations when providing information to a seller. Section 216 is the provision most directly relevant to the day-to-day work of the selling agent and salesperson — it expressly prohibits the disclosure of the reserve or any estimated price to prospective buyers.

Section 216(1) applies to residential property that is to be, may be, or is being offered for sale, whether or not by auction. Under section 216(2), if the property is being offered for sale by auction, the real estate agent must not disclose to any person other than a person acting for the seller: (a) the reserve price set for the offered property; or (b) an amount the real estate agent considers is a price likely to result in a successful or acceptable bid for the offered property.

That second limb is critical and often overlooked. It is not only the reserve that is off-limits. Any amount you personally consider likely to result in a successful bid — whether stated as a number, a range, or even a rough expression of your professional view — falls within the prohibition. The maximum penalty for a breach is 540 penalty units. Based on the current penalty unit value, the prescribed penalty unit value is $154.80, which means 540 penalty units equates to approximately $83,592 at current rates — a significant exposure for a moment’s carelessness.

The prohibition extends to the auctioneer under section 214 in identical terms. Both the selling agent conducting open homes and managing buyer enquiries, and the auctioneer conducting the event itself, are caught. In Queensland, a real estate agent must not distribute misleading price guides in marketing and advertising material, or through written or verbal communication with prospective buyers.

Why Queensland Took This Approach

The policy rationale deserves understanding, because agents who understand the why are better placed to explain it to frustrated buyers and to stay compliant under pressure.

At one time it was common practice in real estate to offer a low quotation for a property in an effort to attract a large pool of competing buyers and increase the final sale price. In Queensland, there are now strict consumer laws that outlaw this practice and prevent the dissemination of misleading property price guides. The practice — variously called underquoting, bait pricing, or price baiting — was widespread across the eastern states. Underquoting, bait advertising and price baiting refer to the act of representing a property at a price that is less than the true expected sale price. This type of misleading commercial behaviour causes prospective real estate buyers to spend time and resources looking into properties that they have no hope of buying.

As a practical example: if owners put a reserve at $700,000, and an agent provides a price guide of $550,000, several buyers with a maximum budget of $600,000 might turn up hoping to bid. The property will seem to be in high demand and the sale price may be pushed up, even though it is out of the price range of most attendees. The problem is systemic and causes real financial harm — buyers who rely on inaccurate price guidance commission building and pest inspections, incur legal fees, and attend auctions for properties they have no prospect of securing.

As an agent cannot know how high the final bid will be, it is misleading to give a price guide. It also prevents agents from ‘heating up’ an auction by drawing in bidders who have no chance of being the final winning bidder. Queensland’s solution was more absolute than other states: rather than attempting to regulate the accuracy of price guides, the legislature simply prohibited price guide representations for auction properties altogether.

The new laws are not designed to remove transparency. Sale by auction is arguably the most transparent method of sale as it’s conducted in a public forum where all bids are disclosed to the participants in the process. The market, not the agent, determines value. That is both the philosophical justification for the prohibition and the honest answer you can give a buyer who pushes back.

Exactly What Agents Cannot Say to Bidders

Understanding the general prohibition is one thing. Knowing which specific statements or actions are prohibited in practice is what keeps licences intact. The following scenarios represent the territory where Queensland agents regularly get this wrong.

Verbal Price Indications in Any Form

The Act provides that, in the case of a property being sold by auction, agents are not allowed to provide a price representation or price guide, both in marketing material or verbally. This covers the full range of informal guidance an agent might be tempted to give. You cannot say “I’d be bidding around the $800s if it were me.” You cannot say “I’d come prepared for something north of nine.” You cannot wink and say “I reckon it’ll go under a mill.” All of these constitute a representation of a price likely to result in a successful bid. The prohibition is on the substance of the communication, not merely on formal written guides.

The Reserve Price

This is the most clearly stated prohibition, but it still trips agents up in practice. A buyer might reason that asking the agent whether the reserve has been set — or, having found out through other means, asking you to confirm it — is a grey area. It is not. The reserve price remains confidential and cannot be disclosed to anyone except those legally acting for the seller. You cannot confirm it, hint at it, or indicate whether bidding is likely to reach it. The only people entitled to know the reserve are those acting on behalf of the vendor.

”Offers Over” Language Used as a Disguised Guide

Private treaty agents will be familiar with the “offers over” convention, and it has specific compliance requirements of its own. In Queensland, an agent can only use the phrase “offers over” if the price is the actual minimum that the vendor is willing to consider. For an auction property, the question does not even arise in those terms — but agents sometimes attempt to use similar expressions during an auction campaign as a way of signalling a floor. This is prohibited conduct. Any expression that frames a price as a starting point, a minimum expectation, or a floor is a price representation for the purposes of the Act.

Steering Bidders Based on Your Valuation Assessment

Section 216(2)(b) is the provision that catches agents who think they are being helpful rather than compliant. If you tell a buyer “I don’t think you need to stretch your budget as far as $950,000 for this one,” you have disclosed your view of the likely successful bid price. It does not matter that you phrased it as a negative — you have communicated a price ceiling beneath which you believe the property will sell. That falls squarely within the prohibition.

The same logic applies in reverse. Advising a buyer that their budget “probably won’t be enough” for a particular property, without any price reference, is generally acceptable — that is an observation about their position, not a price representation. But the moment you anchor that advice to a number, you cross the line.

What About Online Search Brackets?

You may give a price (or price range) to an electronic listings provider in order to sort the property into a search category on their website. They may not disclose the price on their website. Instead, they will need to include the following statement: “This property is being sold by auction or without a price and therefore a price guide cannot be provided. The website may have filtered the property into a price bracket for website functionality purposes.”

This is a narrow exception that permits the property to appear in filtered search results, not a mechanism for communicating price guidance to buyers. The agent must set the search dollar value with the seller’s express instruction on the Form 6 listing authority. They’ll also need their seller’s consent to the web search amount for properties advertised without an advertised price. The bracket exists to facilitate search functionality. It is not a back-door price guide and should not be communicated to bidders as such.

What Agents Can Legitimately Provide

The prohibition is absolute regarding price guides and price representations to buyers. Within that constraint, there is still meaningful information agents can legitimately offer.

If they have consent from the property owner, real estate agents can provide prospective buyers with a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), which includes comparable sales recently completed in that suburb with similar attributes. This is the legislated alternative to a price guide. The CMA provides buyers with market evidence — factual, transactional data — and leaves the buyer to draw their own conclusions about value. It does not tell them what the property will sell for. It tells them what comparable properties have sold for.

Under the new laws there is no room for creativity on an agent’s part. The CMA is to be given with the seller’s consent. The price search amount on the web will be determined with the seller’s instruction. Buyers will get information — but only information based in solid market data and with the seller’s sign-off.

The CMA route requires seller consent in writing before you pass market information to a prospective buyer. That consent is typically obtained and documented at the time of listing, and it is prudent to capture it explicitly in your Form 6 appointment. Section 215 of the Act provides that if a person wanting to sell residential property asks a real estate agent for information about the likely sale price, and the agent decides to give that information, the agent must also provide a copy of a comparative market analysis for the offered property, or if a CMA cannot be prepared, a written explanation showing how the real estate agent determined the market value.

You can also discuss property features, comparable results, suburb market conditions, demand levels, and auction process mechanics with buyers. None of that constitutes a price representation. What you cannot do is synthesise any of it into a conclusion about what this specific property is likely to sell for.

The Federal Layer: Australian Consumer Law

It is worth noting that the Queensland statutory regime does not operate in isolation. The Competition and Consumer Act 2010 prohibits deceptive or misleading conduct. The Competition and Consumer Act 2010 prohibits bait advertising. In practice, this means that an advertised product must be available for a ‘reasonable’ period of time in ‘reasonable’ quantities. A price representation made by an agent that is demonstrably inconsistent with what the vendor would accept may also breach Australian Consumer Law, independent of the specific Property Occupations Act provisions.

Under Australian Consumer Law, it makes no difference whether the agent intended to mislead or deceive — it is how the conduct was perceived that matters. This is the hardest element for agents to internalise. An honest mistake, a well-intentioned estimate, a casual remark that a buyer relied upon — all of these can attract liability if the reasonable buyer could have perceived them as misleading. The standard is objective, not subjective.

This dual exposure means that agents and principals should apply the Queensland price guide prohibition not merely as a technical rule to comply with but as a genuine floor for consumer-fair conduct. The federal consumer law backstop means that even conduct which might slip through the specific Queensland provisions could still attract attention if buyers are misled.

The Principal’s Exposure: Responsibility Doesn’t Stop at the Salesperson

Principals running multi-agent offices face a compounded compliance challenge. The Property Occupations Act imposes liability not only on the individual salesperson who makes a prohibited representation but on the licensed principal responsible for their conduct. Behind every successful auction is a tightly regulated framework governing who may conduct an auction, who may bid, and how the process must be documented. For agents and auctioneers, understanding these obligations is essential to ensuring both compliance and confidence on auction day.

In practice, this means that any salesperson within a principal’s team can create liability for the principal if they make a prohibited price representation — in an open home conversation, an email, a text message, or a phone call. Principals who do not actively train their teams on these rules, and who do not maintain supervision of auction campaign communications, are exposed.

The risk is particularly acute because the situations in which buyers ask for price guidance are precisely the situations where salespeople feel the most social pressure to be helpful. A buyer who has travelled interstate to inspect a property, or an elderly buyer who “just wants a rough idea,” creates a human dynamic that novice agents find difficult to navigate. The correct response is clear, professionally delivered, and non-negotiable: “Queensland law doesn’t allow me to give you a price guide for auction properties. What I can do is provide you with recent comparable sales figures if the vendor has consented, which will help you form your own view.”

That response is both legally compliant and commercially professional. It does not end the relationship with the buyer. It does not imply the agent is unhelpful. It positions the agent as someone who operates properly.

Penalties and Enforcement Context

Failing to comply with the reserve price disclosure rules may result in penalties of up to $32,260. For the broader price representation offences under section 216, the maximum penalty of 540 penalty units translates to approximately $83,592 at the current penalty unit rate, based on the penalty unit value published under Queensland’s Penalties and Sentences Act 1992. These are not infringement-notice-style penalties that can be paid and forgotten — they are matters capable of being prosecuted in court, with consequences that include disciplinary action, licence suspension, and cancellation.

The Queensland Office of Fair Trading is the primary regulator and has enforcement powers that include investigating complaints, issuing compliance notices, and commencing proceedings against individual licensees and principals alike. Complaints from buyers who believe they were misled are a common trigger for investigation. In a market where buyers are frustrated by their inability to gauge where a property will sell — a frustration that is a predictable consequence of the price guide ban itself — the likelihood of a complaint being lodged when an auction result exceeds a buyer’s expectations is real and ongoing.

Failure to comply with obligations under the Act can result in serious consequences including monetary penalties, disciplinary action, suspension or cancellation of a licence, and regulatory enforcement action.

What This Means for Queensland Agents

The queensland auction price guide rules are not ambiguous once understood, but they are consistently tested in practice because buyers ask natural questions and salespeople want to be helpful. The framework requires a specific discipline: the answer to any question about what a property will sell for is always some form of “I cannot tell you, and here’s why.”

Several practical disciplines follow from the legal position:

• Every auction campaign file should document the seller’s written consent (or absence of consent) for the CMA to be shared with buyers. Do not wait to be asked — record it at listing.
• Train all salespersons in the team on the exact language they should use when buyers ask price questions at open homes. Role-play it. The scripted response should be a reflex, not a deliberation under pressure.
• Review all written buyer communications — emails, text messages, portal enquiry responses — before each auction. A single line that reads “I think you’d be competitive at $X” is a potential breach, regardless of channel.
• When providing a CMA to a buyer, do not annotate it with your view of likely sale price. Let the data speak. Your interpretation of that data is a price representation.
• If a buyer pushes hard for guidance after you have explained the restriction, document that conversation. If a complaint is later made, your file should show that you explained the legal position clearly rather than made a prohibited statement.
• Principals should have their auction campaign communication protocols reviewed and communicated to their team at least annually, ideally at the start of the auction season.

The price guide prohibition is Queensland-specific and distinct from the approaches taken in New South Wales and Victoria. Agents who have worked in other states, and interstate investors who ask their Queensland agent why they “can’t just give a range,” need to be clearly told that the legislative framework here operates differently. Understanding and explaining that difference is part of the professional competence Queensland’s market now demands.