Questions people ask before they call

Search the Fair Trading Licensing Register at ftlr.fairtrading.qld.gov.au. It is the Queensland Office of Fair Trading’s “public register of all licensed property agents, salespeople and corporations”, and the search is free. Enter licence number 4963575 or the name.

You will get back four things: the licence number, the name of the holder, the type of licence, and the date the data was last updated in the ‘details current at’ field. That is enough to confirm a licence of the right class exists on the day you look.

If the answer has to hold up in a dispute, buy the extract instead. The Office of Fair Trading states plainly that the free online register “is for your information only. You cannot use it as evidence in legal proceedings.” The extract costs $20.70 on the fee schedule updated 1 July 2026 and is sent within 10 working days.

Nineteen units of nationally recognised training, drawn from the Certificate IV in Real Estate Practice and the Diploma of Property (Agency Management). The salesperson registration underneath it is 12 of those units.

Then the eligibility and suitability tests. An applicant must be 18 or older, must not be an insolvent under administration, must not be currently disqualified from holding a licence or registration certificate, and must not have been convicted of a serious offence within the past 5 years. The Office of Fair Trading also weighs criminal history, previous insolvencies of corporations where the applicant was an executive officer, claim fund actions, licence cancellations, director disqualifications and character.

Then the application, which the Office of Fair Trading states takes 4 to 6 weeks to process, at a fee of $1,709.00 for 1 year or $3,205.00 for 3 years for an individual new application from 1 July 2026.

No, and the unit list is the proof. Not one of the 19 units in the Queensland pathway is a business valuation unit, a business broking unit or a financial statement analysis unit. Four of them are tenancy units and two are trust account units.

The licence is an authority to act as an agent, granted after a suitability test and a training requirement. It is not a certification of competence in selling businesses, and anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a document they have not read.

What you get from this practice is a market appraisal, which is an opinion of likely selling price. A formal valuation for legal, tax or family law purposes is a different exercise, done by a registered valuer or a qualified accountant, and you will be told so and pointed at one.

A licensed broker whose working life has been spent inside the kind of businesses you are selling, rather than only alongside them.

What sits behind it is more than twenty years of operating roles: appraising heavy plant, trucks and transport fleets at volume in industrial auction and remarketing, and running a national online retailer built on custom manufacture, measure and install. He also co founded, owned, built and sold a toy retail and wholesale business with his wife, which means he has been the seller signing the appointment rather than the agent presenting it.

ASIC’s own consumer checklist for choosing an adviser runs to five items and not one of them is a result: qualifications and registration check out, you understand the fees, they listen and understand your objectives, they communicate in a way that suits you, and they are transparent. Those five are the ones to apply here.

A Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, which is the national qualification for designing, delivering and assessing nationally recognised vocational training. It has been used to build and design online safety training programmes.

Entry to that qualification requires demonstrated vocational competence in the area a person proposes to train and assess in. It authorises training only in areas where the holder has that competence, so it is not a general credential and it is not a broking qualification.

It is worth saying what it is not, because training qualifications get quoted loosely. It is not one of the 19 units in the Queensland licensing pathway, it confers no valuation authority, and it does not appear on any register that a regulator maintains for business brokers.

Ask for the testamur and read the code on it. That is the honest answer and it is the reason no code appears anywhere on this site.

The national register at training.gov.au lists a current Certificate IV in Training and Assessment that supersedes, and is equivalent to, an earlier version of the same qualification. They carry different national codes. Which code is printed on a given person’s certification document is a fact about that document, not about the register.

So the position taken here is to name the qualification and not the code, and to hand over the testamur on request. A code stated on a website and a code printed on a testamur are two different claims, and only one of them can be checked.

No. The Institute is a professional membership organisation. It does not issue the Queensland licence, does not supervise trust accounts and does not administer the statutory claim fund. Those are Office of Fair Trading functions under the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) and the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld).

What membership does mean is that the member has joined a body with a published Code of Conduct and is bound by it. The Code requires integrity, placing the client’s interests first, written instructions before acting, and keeping clients promptly informed of substantial developments. The Code says of itself: “These rules do not replace any law.”

There is a real gap in public guidance here. business.gov.au tells sellers that business brokers help buy and sell businesses, says to check their professional credentials, and points to the Institute. It does not mention state licensing at all. Check the Office of Fair Trading register as well as any membership badge.

No, and it will be some years before that is possible. The Registered Business Valuer accreditation is run by the Australian Institute of Business Brokers, and its published requirements include “a minimum of 5 years’ continuous experience as a current full time practicing business brokers”.

The five year continuous practice test is not one this practice can meet yet, and the accreditation also requires the Certified Practicing Business Broker accreditation, the Advanced Business Brokers course or equivalent, references, a personal disclosure form and professional indemnity insurance once accredited.

Naming the credential and what it requires is more useful than leaving it out. If you need a formal valuation from a Registered Business Valuer, say so and you will be pointed to one.

No. That matters if anyone proposes selling the shares in your company rather than the assets of the business. Section 764A(1) of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) makes a share in a body a financial product.

Section 766C makes arranging for a person to acquire or dispose of a financial product a dealing, and dealing is a financial service. ASIC Regulatory Guide 36 at RG 36.42 defines arranging as bringing “into effect the issue, variation, disposal or acquisition of, or application for, a financial product”.

So share sales are scoped out and referred to someone licensed for them. You can check that statement yourself: the ASIC professional registers at service.asic.gov.au and the Financial Advisers Register on moneysmart.gov.au return whether a named person holds or is authorised under an Australian financial services licence, free. This name is not on them.

No, and both boundaries carry penalties, which is the clearest way to show they are real rather than modest.

Charging for a tax agent service without registration attracts a civil penalty of up to 250 penalty units for an individual under the Tax Agent Services Act 2009 (Cth). At the Commonwealth penalty unit value of $364 from 1 July 2026, that is $91,000. Registration is free to check on the Tax Practitioners Board register.

Section 24 of the Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) makes engaging in legal practice without being an Australian legal practitioner an offence, maximum 300 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment. At the Queensland penalty unit value of $172.70 from 1 July 2026, 300 penalty units is $51,810. Sections 24(3A) to (3E) carve out a Property Occupations Act licensee completing an approved contract, and that carve out is the limit of it.

In a general trust account, governed by the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld). Section 16 requires the agent to pay a received amount into that account “before the end of the first business day after receiving the amount”. Section 20 puts the money beyond the reach of the agent’s creditors.

The account is audited. Section 30 requires an auditor to be appointed within 1 month of the account being opened. Sections 35 and 40 require the accounts to be audited and a signed report filed within 4 months after the last day of the audit month. For a licensee, the audit month is ordinarily the month falling 8 months after the licence was first issued.

Behind that sits the claim fund under Part 6 of the same Act. Section 82 lists the events that found a claim, including stealing or misapplication of entrusted property. Section 25 of the Agents Financial Administration Regulation 2014 (Qld) caps recovery at $200,000 per claimant and $2,000,000 in total arising out of contraventions by a single person. None of those protections attaches to an unlicensed intermediary, because none of them can.

No. That is a claim about myself, so here is where to test it rather than take it, and every one of these searches is free.

The Office of Fair Trading publishes court outcomes, an enforceable undertakings register naming each party, the date of the undertaking and the legislation alleged to have been breached, and a businesses and traders to avoid list. ASIC’s banned and disqualified search covers corporate, financial services and credit bans and returns the name, the type of ban, the start date and whether it is permanent.

Do not use the licence register for this. Whether the Queensland licensee search or the paid extract discloses disciplinary history could not be confirmed from the Office of Fair Trading’s published description of either product when this was checked on 14 August 2026, so treat the register as answering one question only: whether a licence exists and what class it is.

Yes, and the way to check it is a certificate of currency issued by the insurer, naming the insured entity, the policy period and the limit of indemnity. Ask for it before you sign anything, not after.

There is no public register of a broker’s professional indemnity cover in Australia, so this is one of the checks that has to be done on documents rather than on a website. The Code of Conduct of the Australian Institute of Business Brokers addresses insurance, and its Registered Business Valuer accreditation requires professional indemnity insurance once accredited.

Insurance is not the same protection as the claim fund and it does not replace it. The claim fund under the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld) answers stolen or misapplied trust money, capped at $200,000 per claimant. Professional indemnity answers a negligence claim. Ask about both.

It gets destroyed or de identified, unless a law requires it to be kept. That is the rule in APP 11.2 of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), which applies where the information is no longer needed and retention is not required by Australian law or a court order.

Where an anti money laundering obligation applies, retention is required by law. AUSTRAC requires transaction records to be kept for 7 years and customer identification procedure records to be kept for the duration of the relationship and for 7 years after the last designated service. While that clock runs, APP 11.2 does not bite. When it stops, it does.

One point on identity documents. The OAIC’s Privacy guidance for reporting entities under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act, checked 20 August 2026, states: “The AML/CTF Act does not require you to keep scanned copies or photocopies of identity documents themselves for record keeping purposes.” That applies from 1 July 2026 for tranche two reporting entities. What it says to keep instead is “records of personal information from the identification document”, along with “the type of document, what you did to identify the customer and the outcome of the verification and analysis, identification or assessment of ML/TF risk”. A practice that began in July 2026 has no legacy copies to argue about.