Victoria should follow Queensland on underquoting because the simple model already works

Underquoting rules in Victoria are about to be tightened again. The Government has announced a new plan that will require agents to publish the vendor reserve price at least seven days before an auction or a fixed date sale. If the reserve is not published in time the auction cannot go ahead. More rules more penalties and more regulation around what agents can and cannot say.

It all sounds good on paper but the real question is simple. Why are we reinventing the wheel when another state already solved this years ago. Queensland cracked this problem by doing the opposite of what Victoria keeps doing. Instead of layering more rules and rebates and enforcement structures they stripped the entire concept back to something very simple.

In Queensland the rule is clear. If a property is being sold by auction you do not quote a price. Full stop. No price guides. No price ranges. No educated guesses. No marketing tricks. Buyers are expected to do their own research. Agents are expected to run a fair campaign. The reserve stays with the vendor and the public does not get fed an artificial number that may not mean anything in the first place.

The result is cleaner. Buyers look at comparable sales the way they should. They decide what the property is worth to them. The agent is not forced into an impossible corner trying to give a guide that satisfies both the vendor and the legislation. And the regulator is not playing cat and mouse every weekend trying to work out whether an agent’s estimate was misleading.

Victoria on the other hand keeps designing solutions that add more rules to a system that is already buckling under its own weight. The new requirement to publish the reserve seven days before auction sounds neat but ignores the fact that vendors often change their minds. Market feedback genuinely shifts during a campaign. Some buyers pull out. Some come in strong at the last minute. A reserve set a week earlier can be meaningless by Saturday morning. So now what. Penalise vendors for responding to the market. Cancel auctions because someone adjusted their expectations. It starts to look like regulation for the sake of it.

If the real aim is to fix the problem and actually protect buyers then the simplest solution is to reduce interference. Not increase it. Let the market operate. Let buyers do their homework. Let agents run a competitive process without bureaucratic hurdles that have nothing to do with the real reason property prices move.

There is also an uncomfortable truth that the Government avoids in every press conference. Underquoting is not the reason houses are expensive. Demand is. Victoria is short of supply and has been for years. Population pressures are up construction costs are high and planning delays are blowing out builds across the state. You cannot legislate away a fundamental supply problem. It is the same story every time. Too many buyers chasing too few homes.

If the Government really wants to fix the affordability issue the answer is obvious. Approve more housing faster. Encourage more construction in areas where people want to live. Remove some of the planning bottlenecks that councils have turned into an art form. You cannot keep announcing new rules for real estate agents and call it a solution. The real solution is to add supply instead of choking the process with more compliance work that has very little impact on the price someone is willing to pay at an auction.

Queensland understands this. They keep the auction process clean and simple. No price quoting means no arguments about underquoting. Buyers walk in with their own research. The market sets the result on the day. It is transparent and it avoids the complex regulatory dance that Victoria keeps dancing around.

Victoria could do the same. Instead we get more forms more compliance duties and more risk that perfectly good auctions will be cancelled because someone did not publish a number on a website in time. That is not consumer protection. That is bureaucracy.

If the aim is to protect buyers and fix the system then it is time to look north. The wheel already exists. It works. It is tested. And it is far cleaner than the approach being drafted for Victoria. The best reform would be to stop adding rules and start fixing the actual cause of the problem. Boost supply. Clear planning backlogs. Let the market find its level. And stop pretending underquoting reforms will magically make houses cheaper.