Seller Disclosure Statement in Queensland

For most of the state's history the rule for a Queensland sale was that a buyer investigated the property themselves. A seller had to avoid actively misleading anyone, but there was no general duty to volunteer what they knew, and what a buyer failed to discover was the buyer's problem.

That changed on 1 August 2025. The Property Law Act 2023 introduced a mandatory seller disclosure scheme, and it applies to the sale of existing residential property, commercial property and vacant land.

The obligation is on the seller, not the agent and not the buyer. It is also not something a clever contract clause can be drafted around. The REIQ's guidance to its own members is blunt about that: no contract term overrides the statutory duty.

The practical effect is that a Queensland sale now starts earlier than it used to. The paperwork that used to be assembled after a contract was signed has to exist before it is signed, and a seller who lists first and gathers documents later has the sequence backwards.

Two things, together, before the buyer signs the contract: a completed and signed disclosure statement in the approved form, and the prescribed certificates that go with it.

The approved form is the Form 2. It runs in four parts. Part 1 identifies the seller and the property, including the lot on plan description. Part 2 covers title searches, encumbrances on the land and any residential tenancy agreement affecting it. Part 3 is the planning and environment set: zoning, transport infrastructure notices, resumption notices, whether the land is on the contaminated land registry, tree applications and heritage listings. Part 4 covers whether there is a pool, the community titles scheme details if there is one, and statutory notices given under building and planning legislation.

The prescribed certificates are the supporting evidence rather than a second form. Depending on the property they include a title search, the registered survey plan, environmental, building and planning notices, tree applications, a pool safety certificate where a pool exists, and for a lot in a scheme the community management statement and a body corporate certificate.

The timing word doing the work is before. Not at the same time, and not shortly afterwards. A statement handed over with the contract, or emailed the following morning, has not been given before the buyer signed.

The buyer may terminate the contract at any time up to settlement.

That is the sentence worth reading twice, because it is not the shape of remedy people expect. There is no five-day window and no fixed cure period. The right sits open for the whole life of the contract, and it ends only when settlement happens.

It is available where the disclosure was not given at all, and also where it was given but was incomplete or inaccurate. In that second case the buyer has to establish more than a technical error: that the defect was material, that they were not already aware of the true position, and that they would not have signed had they known.

For a seller, the exposure is not really the legal test. It is the timing. A contract that falls over a week before settlement, after the seller has committed to a purchase of their own and booked a removalist, is a far more expensive problem than the cost of a title search would ever have been.

The exemptions are narrow, and three of the four describe a buyer rather than a property.

They are: where the buyer is the State, a government body, a constructing authority or a listed corporation; where the buyer and seller are related parties; where the sale price is over $10 million and the buyer waives disclosure; and where the seller is a local council recovering unpaid rates.

The $10 million case is the one most often described loosely. It is not an automatic exemption for expensive property. The buyer has to waive the disclosure, which means an ordinary high-value sale to an ordinary buyer who does not waive is inside the scheme like any other.

For almost every seller reading this, none of the four applies. The scheme is the default and the exemptions are the exception.

This is the question the search results do not answer. It sits in Google's People Also Ask box on this exact query and in the related searches beneath it, and the ranking pages step around it.

There is no government fee for the Form 2 itself. The cost is in the certificates and searches attached to it, and it varies with what the property is rather than what it is worth. A freestanding house on a plain title needs a short list. A lot in a community titles scheme needs a body corporate certificate as well, and that is usually the largest single item and the slowest to arrive.

Most sellers have their solicitor or conveyancer assemble it, because the same person is drafting the contract and already ordering the searches. Some search providers offer a packaged version. An agent can coordinate it, and should, but the obligation and the signature stay with the seller.

We publish the arithmetic on our Queensland selling costs page rather than here, so that the disclosure figures sit beside commission, marketing and conveyancing instead of being read in isolation. FAA does not sell searches or certificates and has no price of its own to quote for them.

Start the paperwork before the photographs.

The old sequence was to appoint an agent, launch the campaign and let the solicitor catch up. Under this scheme the disclosure has to be complete before the first buyer signs anything, and buyers move fastest on a property in its first fortnight. A campaign that opens without the pack ready is a campaign that either stalls at the offer or proceeds on a defective disclosure.

If the property is in a scheme, order the body corporate certificate first. If there is a pool, confirm the safety certificate position early, because bringing a non-compliant pool fence up to standard is measured in weeks.

And if the property is tenanted, the tenancy is disclosed in Part 2 from the outset, which tends to make the conversation about vacant possession happen earlier and more honestly than it used to.