The Form 6 Appointment of Agent

A Queensland agent cannot act for you until you have both signed a Form 6, the appointment or reappointment of a property agent, and it is required by the Property Occupations Act 2014.

It covers both halves of the industry. The same form appoints an agent to sell a property and appoints a property manager to run one, which is why it turns up in two very different conversations.

It is easy to treat as onboarding paperwork. It is not. Every fee anybody charges you over the life of the relationship has to be written on this form before you sign it, and a fee that is not on the form is not a fee you have agreed to pay.

The completed form has to be given to the client. Signing a copy and never seeing it again is not the process working.

Four things, and each is worth reading rather than skimming.

The services the agent will perform, together with any limits, restrictions or conditions on them. This is where a management appointment says what is included in the fee and what is charged separately, and where a sales appointment describes the campaign.

The commission, fees and expenses. Commission must be expressed inclusive of GST, and the form must say when it becomes payable. That second part decides whether commission is owed on an unconditional contract, at settlement, or on some other trigger, and the difference is not academic if a contract falls over.

When payment is due. And an end date, for a sole or exclusive agency.

There is no standard commission to compare it against. Maximum rates were deregulated in Queensland in 2014, and the REIQ tells its own members that calling a rate standard or prescribed can amount to misleading and deceptive conduct. The number on the form is the number you negotiated.

Three appointment types, and the difference between the first two is a single scenario that costs real money.

Under a sole agency, the appointed agent is entitled to commission if another agent sells the property. They are not entitled to commission if you sell it yourself.

Under an exclusive agency, the agent is entitled to commission regardless of who sells the property, including where you sell it yourself to your own buyer.

Under an open listing, you may appoint several agents, and commission goes to whichever agent was the effective cause of the sale. That sounds tidy and is the most common source of a commission dispute, because two agents who each showed the buyer through will each say they caused it.

The words sole and exclusive are used loosely in ordinary speech as though they meant the same thing. On this form they do not, and the scenario that separates them is the one where a neighbour or a friend of the family turns out to be the buyer.

A sale appointment for one or two residential properties has a maximum term of 90 days. If you agree on a term longer than 60 days, the appointment has to remain in effect for at least 60 days.

A continuing appointment, which is what a property management appointment is, has no maximum term. It runs until somebody ends it.

Ending a continuing appointment takes at least 30 days written notice from either party. A sole or exclusive agency also requires a minimum of 30 days notice. An open listing can be ended at any time by written notice.

That 30-day notice period is the practical answer to the question landlords actually ask, which is how quickly they can move to a different property manager. The answer is not immediately, and it is worth knowing before the frustration rather than during it.

The fee schedule, in full, including the items that are not the headline percentage. On a management appointment that means the letting fee, the lease renewal fee, the administration or statement fee, marketing for a new tenancy, tribunal attendance and any end-of-financial-year charge. Each of those is legitimate and each has to be on the form.

The trigger for commission on a sale, because payable on an unconditional contract and payable at settlement are different promises.

The end date, and whether the term is longer than you intended. A 90-day sale appointment with an underperforming campaign is a long time.

And the services column, because the clearest signal of what an agency actually does is the list of things it has written down that it will do.

We can tell you what the form must contain, and we have. We cannot publish FAA's own management fee or commission on this page, and it would be dishonest to imply that the omission is an oversight.

Our fee schedule has not been released for publication. Until it is, no page on this site states an FAA management fee, and the market ranges we publish on our Queensland property management fees page are attributed to the REIQ and are explicitly not our rates.

The number you should be comparing is the one on the Form 6 in front of you, from whichever agency you are considering, because that is the only rate that binds anyone.

If you want ours, ask us for it directly. It arrives on a Form 6, in writing, before you sign anything, which is exactly where the Act intends it to be.