If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny. Victoria has marched onto the stage yet again with its latest “radical plan” to stamp out underquoting. You can almost hear the drumroll from Spring Street. The government steps forward, chest puffed, announcing that this will finally fix everything.
Meanwhile every Queenslander is sitting back with a beer thinking, “Mate… we solved that ages ago. Just ban price guides. Done.”
Honestly, how hard is it. Queensland did it without breaking a sweat. You don’t quote a price. You don’t hint a price. You don’t wink a price. Buyers can offer what they’re willing to pay, and everyone gets on with their lives.
But no. We’re in Victoria. We need a forty page consultation paper, five committees, a regulatory impact statement, a ministerial press conference, and a three-year enforcement rollout… all to end up with something that still won’t work because somebody in the system will keep playing games.
The new plan says agents have to use “independent data” to set their ranges. That’ll last about five minutes before someone figures out how to choose “independent data” that just happens to support whatever they wanted to quote anyway. And the government will act shocked. “Who could have predicted this?”
Queenslanders could have. They’ve been predicting it for decades.
You almost feel sorry for Victorian buyers. They burn fuel driving from inspection to inspection chasing a property that was never in their budget. It’s like sending someone to Bunnings with five dollars and telling them they can probably buy a lawnmower. Every Saturday ends in disappointment and a sausage in bread.
In Queensland, none of that circus happens. The property goes to auction with no guide. No bait. No pretend price. No “it’ll go for low eights” that ends in $1.15 million. People rock up, bid what they can afford, and the world keeps turning.
But Victoria? Not a chance. We’ll spend the next ten years designing “crackdowns” that crack down on nothing. Agents will keep saying “market demand exceeded expectations” which is code for “we knew it would go for more, but underquoting is a competitive sport here.”
If the government really wanted to fix it, they’d copy Queensland’s model tomorrow. But of course they won’t, because logic isn’t part of the Victorian rulebook anymore.
Until then, prepare for more announcements, more compliance manuals, more headlines, and more wasted Saturdays. All while the answer sits 1,700 kilometres north, waving politely and saying: “You could just do what we did… but sure, keep reinventing it.”
