Questions owners in Brisbane ask

No. Brisbane City Council states that food business licences are not transferable. Your buyer has to apply for a new licence in their own name, and the premises is inspected before it issues.

Council must decide the application within 30 days of receiving it. In practice that means the buyer should lodge early, and the contract should carry a condition that deals with the licence rather than assuming it will be there on the day.

Fees read from council pages in August 2026 were $1,005.90 for a food preparation area under 250 square metres, $1,374.05 for 250 to 1,000 square metres and $4,293.70 above 1,000 square metres.

Yes, if you agree in writing. Council allows a footpath dining permit to be transferred where the buyer is buying or leasing the food business, subject to your written consent as the current permit holder, the incoming operator holding a food business licence, and the premises not having been modified without approval.

Because your consent is a condition, an outdoor trading area worth real money can stall on a signature. Put the consent in the contract at the same time you agree the price.

A new permit costs $1,099.70, with a footpath occupation fee of $171.30 to $596.15 per square metre a year by zone. Inside the malls, annual consent is $954.75 per square metre in the Queen Street Mall and $289.25 per square metre in the Brunswick Street and Chinatown malls.

It is a commercial term rather than a background fact. Brisbane City Plan 2014 puts your land in one of five flood planning areas or the local overland flow class, and council maps river flood, creek flood, overland flow and storm tide separately.

In February 2022, 23,400 properties across 177 suburbs were affected, against 14,100 properties across 94 suburbs in January 2011. The 2022 event combined river, creek and overland flow, which is exactly the mix that reaches Rocklea, Archerfield, Moorooka, Salisbury and Coopers Plains on the Oxley Creek floodplain.

Pull the free FloodWise Property Report for your site before you go to market, because a buyer will. Council warns that its flood awareness parcel data is not intended for due diligence, and directs buyers to lodge a planning and development certificate application instead.

Selling the business does not. A material change of use can. Brisbane City Council levies infrastructure charges where a change of use generates extra demand on trunk infrastructure, under the Brisbane Infrastructure Charges Resolution (No. 15) 2026, which commenced 1 July 2026.

A demand credit is available for the demand placed by buildings, hardstand and land that lawfully existed on the site, claimed on Prescribed Form B and Checklist B. The credit is why the lawful use of record matters so much.

The risk shows up where a buyer intends to do something different with the premises, or where an older industrial or suburban retail tenancy has drifted away from its recorded use. Check what use is actually approved on your site before a buyer’s town planner does.

Surface coating is ERA 38, one of five environmentally relevant activities devolved to Brisbane City Council. The others are ERA 6 asphalt manufacturing, ERA 12 plastic product manufacturing, ERA 19 metal forming and ERA 49 boat maintenance or repair.

The authority does not simply follow the business. A transfer application and a transfer fee apply. Council’s published application fee is $768.40 with an annual fee of $920.60.

If your activity is state administered rather than devolved, the transfer runs through the Queensland Government process instead. Confirm which one you hold before the contract is drawn, because the path is different.

Deep, and skewed. Brisbane had 142,547 businesses at 30 June 2024, which is 28.0 per cent of every business in Queensland on 1,342.7 square kilometres of the state.

The skew matters more than the size. Professional, scientific and technical services is 18.1 per cent of the Brisbane base against 12.4 per cent statewide, and Brisbane holds 40.8 per cent of that division in Queensland. Financial and insurance services runs at an index of 1.43, health care at 1.27 and wholesale trade at 1.21.

Construction is the other way around, at 12.5 per cent of the Brisbane base against 17.1 per cent for Queensland. If your business sells to builders, your local buyer pool is thinner than the headline number suggests, and Ipswich, Logan and Moreton Bay carry more of those buyers.

Yes. At 30 June 2024 only 13,166 Brisbane businesses, 9.2 per cent of the base, turned over $2 million or more a year. Only 4,773, or 3.3 per cent, employed 20 or more people, and 61.6 per cent employed nobody at all.

That puts a business your size in the top few per cent of the city by scale. The practical effect is a different buyer set, different finance and a different deal structure, because the number of people who can write that cheque locally is small.

It also means comparable evidence is thinner at your end of the market, so the case for your price has to be built from your own numbers rather than from a crowd of similar sales.

As a concentration risk with a visible end date. The Games Venue Infrastructure Program is $7.1 billion with $3.8 billion allocated over the 2025-26 forward estimates, Cross River Rail is running to a services date expected by 2029, and Gabba precinct construction was to commence in the first half of 2027.

That is different from a single customer risk, but it prices in a similar way. A buyer is buying the earnings that continue after the programme, so the more you can evidence work that is not tied to it, the better the earnings look.

The useful preparation is a clean split of revenue by contract and by end client, with contract end dates shown, so a buyer is not left guessing which part of the business has a horizon on it.

Yes, and Brisbane’s office market makes it sharper. Brisbane CBD office vacancy was 10.2 per cent in July 2026, down 1.6 percentage points over the six months to July 2026, against a national CBD vacancy rate of 14.9 per cent. The Property Council of Australia noted it was the first time since 1990 that Brisbane alone recorded the country’s lowest CBD vacancy.

A tight market means rent review risk lands at exactly the point a buyer is doing due diligence. A short residual term in a tight market is a discount to price, because the buyer is carrying the risk of the renegotiation.

Deal with the lease before you list. An agreed option, an extension or a written landlord position is worth more to your price than any amount of marketing copy.

Three things. It sits on the Oxley Creek and Brisbane River floodplain, so the flood planning area class and the FloodWise report do more work here than anywhere else in the city. Land agents in Archerfield now market sites as flood free as a point of difference.

Second, the devolved environmentally relevant activities cluster here. Metal forming, surface coating and plastic product manufacturing are exactly the trades in Rocklea, Archerfield, Acacia Ridge, Coopers Plains, Salisbury, Darra and Wacol.

Third, the freight position cuts both ways. The corridor is served by the Ipswich, Logan and Centenary motorways and the Acacia Ridge intermodal terminal, and Rocklea and Salisbury stations are being rebuilt under Cross River Rail, but road access and congestion are live questions for anyone running vehicles out of it.

There is a council licence to deal with. Brisbane City Council issues a personal appearance services licence covering tattooing, body piercing and skin penetration.

Treat it the same way you would treat a food licence. Establish what is held, in whose name, and what the buyer has to do to hold the equivalent, before a contract is signed rather than after.

Council’s wider business permit list also covers advertising device approvals and commercial driveway permits, both of which can matter to a shopfront business.

The figures are for the Brisbane City Council area, which is one council covering 1,342.7 square kilometres and 190 suburbs, from Wacol to Wynnum, under one planning scheme and one set of local laws.

The wider metro numbers are published separately. Greater Brisbane had an estimated resident population of 2,833,524 at 30 June 2025, up 58,223 people or 2.1 per cent over 2024-25. ShapingSEQ 2023 projects around six million people across South East Queensland by 2046.

If your business trades across the boundary, the councils you may also be dealing with are Moreton Bay, Logan, Ipswich, Redland and Scenic Rim, each with its own planning scheme and its own fees.

It gives you volume and it gives you a known constraint. In the year to 30 June 2025 the port moved 34.9 million tonnes, up 7.8 per cent, and a record 1.62 million TEU, on international cargo valued at $73.5 billion.

Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd states road truck movements to and from the port were approximately 4 million in 2018 and are projected to reach 13 million by 2050 without a dedicated freight rail connection. Its analysis assumed a 30 per cent rail mode share could be achieved by 2035.

The South East Queensland intermodal terminal capacity proposal remains an early stage proposal on Infrastructure Australia’s list, with 5 to 10 year investment timing and a $10 million business case. A buyer of a transport business here is pricing rising volumes against rising road cost.

Urban Utilities handles water, sewerage and trade waste in the Brisbane City Council area, not the council. An approval is required for any business discharging anything other than domestic strength wastewater to sewer, which covers grease trap food premises, mechanical workshops, printers, laundries, food manufacturers and metal finishers.

Whether the approval transfers on a change of owner could not be verified from a published Urban Utilities position, so nothing is claimed here either way.

Ask Urban Utilities directly, in writing, well before you agree a settlement date. If the answer is that a new approval is needed, that is a lead time you want to know about early.

A market appraisal is free and carries no obligation. If you go to market, brokerage is typically a commission on successful sale, so the fee is contingent on delivering a result, with a marketing contribution depending on the campaign. The structure is discussed openly before you engage anyone and there should be no surprises in it.

Price is normally a multiple of normalised earnings, and the multiple varies by sector, size, and how much of the business depends on the owner. A business with contracted revenue, a team that runs without the owner and clean financials sits at the upper end of its sector range. The same revenue delivered through owner held relationships and one off jobs sits well below it. The only way to get a number that means anything is an appraisal against your actual figures.

Not from me. The business is marketed without being identifiable, every enquiry signs a confidentiality agreement and is qualified for financial capacity before receiving anything that identifies you, and sensitive information is released in stages. Nothing goes to market until you approve it in writing.

Six to nine months from the appraisal to settlement, of which three to six is the market campaign and contract. Preparation before the appraisal is additional. Brisbane has the deepest buyer pool in Queensland, which helps, but it also has the most businesses competing for attention at any given time. Preparation is what shortens the process, not the size of the market.

For a Brisbane business, a broker who knows the local market and is easy to get hold of is worth having. What matters more is buyer reach. Your business is presented confidentially across the major business sale portals and taken directly to trade buyers and investors nationally, and the buyer paying the most is frequently interstate rather than local.