Verify everything · Nothing to take on trust
Selling a business in Queensland
Government guidance written for owners, not for brokers. Read it before you speak to anyone, including me.
None of the organisations listed are affiliated with me and none of them endorse this site. Last checked 12 August 2026. Last updated 15 September 2026.
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Selling a business in Queensland
Government guidance written for owners, not for brokers. Read it before you speak to anyone, including me. If a broker's advice contradicts these pages, ask them why.
Why you will be asked to prove who you are before anything is listed
Australia’s anti money laundering and counter terrorism financing regime is set by the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 and is administered by AUSTRAC. The 2024 amendments extended it to a much wider group of professions, and those obligations commenced on 1 July 2026. Where a business sale involves a lease, real property, or the transfer of a company or a trust, the transaction now sits inside that regime, which covers the great majority of business sales.
In practice it means customer due diligence has to be completed before a business can be taken to market. That is an identity check on the seller, and where a company or trust is involved, on the people who control it. It is not a credit check and it is not an assessment of you. It is a legal precondition, the same one your bank and your conveyancer already apply.
The checks are run through an independent verification service. Where Tony Pope is the appointed broker they are paid for out of the campaign fee rather than billed to the seller, so no separate payment passes through a broker’s hands and no trust account question arises under the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld). Allow anywhere from forty eight hours to about seven days depending on how quickly the documents come back. Having your identification and your company or trust paperwork ready is the single thing that speeds it up.
Anyone acting as a reporting entity must enrol with AUSTRAC, keep an AML/CTF program, and report certain matters. That register is public. If you want to know where any broker stands, ask them, and then check.
Section 26 has two limbs, and the second one is the reason a Queensland business broker holds this licence
Section 26 of the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) authorises the holder to perform stated activities “as an agent for others for reward”. The first limb is real property: to buy, sell other than by auction, exchange or let real property or interests in real property. The second limb is separate and it is the one that matters here: to “buy, sell, exchange, or let businesses or interests in businesses”. The section also authorises negotiating for any of those things, and collecting rents.
One licence covers both limbs. Section 24 lists the three categories the chief executive may issue: an auctioneer licence, a real estate agent licence, and a resident letting agent licence. There is no business broker licence and no business agent licence in Queensland. Section 15 defines a property agent as an auctioneer or a real estate agent, and section 16 defines a real estate agent by reference back to section 26.
What it does not authorise is everything outside those activities. It does not authorise selling by auction, which is the auctioneer category. It does not authorise giving tax advice, practising law, or dealing in financial products, and each of those has its own regulator and its own register, set out below. It does not authorise acting for you at all until you have signed a written appointment under section 102, which for a business is the PO Form 6A rather than the residential Form 6.
Acting without a licence is an offence under section 97, maximum 200 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment. At the Queensland penalty unit value of $172.70 applying from 1 July 2026, 200 penalty units is $34,540. Section 97(3) matters as much as 97(1). A person acts as a property agent if they perform a section 26 activity, or if they “advertise, notify or state that the person performs or is willing to perform such an activity”, or if they “in any way hold out as being ready” to. Holding out is the offence, before a single activity is performed. A website is enough.
Two consequences follow for you. Selling your own business needs no licence, because section 97 bites on a person acting as an agent for someone else for reward, and you are not an agent for someone else. And the exemptions in section 97(4) are narrow: employees at a property agent’s office collecting rents and doing administrative tasks, employees of rooming accommodation providers collecting rents, a lawyer collecting rents in compliance with the Legal Profession Act 2007, and a person selling manufactured homes under section 60 of the Manufactured Homes (Residential Parks) Act 2003. There is no accountant exemption and no corporate advisory exemption.
Ask what it is worth
Free, in writing, and nobody finds out you asked. Tell me the trade and the suburb and I will do the rest.
Nobody finds out you are selling. This goes to me only, into my own database in Sydney. I will not contact your accountant, your landlord, your bank or your staff, ever, unless you ask me to.
If you would rather not put anything in writing yet, ring 0431 124 128. Prefer to pick a time yourself? Book a time in my diary.
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You have the licence number, the registers and the legislation. When you have finished checking, the next step is thirty minutes and a number. No cost, no obligation, no follow-up you did not ask for.