Real estate agents forced to follow stricter price guidelines in underquoting crackdown

Real estate agents who underquote property listings will be forced to follow stricter guidelines to justify their price guides after an investigation found agents have been deliberately using bogus “comparable” properties to justify the illegal practice.

Agents who set a property’s estimated sales price on comparable sales must now consider a home’s age and renovation status, as set out in statement of information requirements. It adds to existing guidelines, which instructs agents to consider a home’s architectural style, floor and land size, zoning, distance from key infrastructure and whether it has special features, such as a swimming pool or tennis court.

Agents are also being instructed not to overlook substantially similar properties when picking comparable homes, after complaints that some were deliberately excluding sales of similar properties in the same street, apartment building or even duplex.

By choosing inferior properties, the agents have been attempting to sidestep laws designed to combat underquoting, an illegal practice where agents deliberately list properties for lower than they’re worth to attract more buyers.

The new guidelines include the warning that Consumer Affairs Victoria can force real estate agents to provide evidence for how they chose comparable properties and issue fines for non-compliance.

However, a key loophole also remains. Agents are not required to list three comparable properties if they reasonably believe fewer than three were sold in the past six months in Melbourne, or the past 18 months for regional areas.

Property insiders said it was an increasingly common trend for agents to get around underquoting provisions by leaving the comparable sales section blank, falsely claiming there were no comparable properties, even in inner-city suburbs with hundreds of sales per year.

This masthead’s Bidding Blind investigation, which uncovered systemic underquoting in Melbourne, revealed agents were abusing the requirements by cherry-picking “comparable” properties that weren’t truly comparable.

The introduction of a statement of information was a key plank of the Victorian government’s 2017 law reforms, and requires agents to provide an estimated sale price, in most instances backed by three recent comparable sales.

But agents told the investigation that they would deliberately “cherry-pick” inferior properties to the one for sale, to get away with lower price guides.

Real Estate Institute of Victoria chief executive Jacob Caine said on Thursday that sometimes nearby properties of a similar land size were rightly comparable, but the previous lack of guidelines could be abused.

“I can think of a fully renovated property next door to an 80-year-old weatherboard property on the same-sized block, exactly next door together, and there could be a million dollar price differential in the two of them,” he said. “So the new requirements provide for more specificity.”

Since September 2022, the regulator’s underquoting taskforce has monitored more than 2800 sales campaigns and identified examples of agents selecting properties that greatly differ in age, size, location, build type and renovation status or school zone, despite more suitable comparisons being available.

In the last financial year, it issued just 48 infringement notices.

In comparison, an investigation by The Age used data from 26,000 sales, finding more than half of the properties tracked sold above the top end of the price guide.

The taskforce also reviewed 60 per cent fewer sales campaigns, down to 600 from 1547 the year before.

Although Caine said the new laws would be a positive step in trying to solve underquoting, he added more work was needed. He previously advocated for laws to force the disclosure of a home’s reserve price before auction, which the government has not addressed in its Thursday announcement.

Consumer Affairs Victoria director Nicole Rich said since its taskforce was established in September 2022 more than 25 per cent of complaints were about appropriately comparable properties being overlooked for homes that were not truly comparable.

“It’s a real frustration for people,” Rich told ABC Radio Melbourne. “We really feel like we need to crack down on that loophole.”

Consumer Affairs Minister Nick Staikos said tightening statement of information requirements was one of many reforms the government had made to address underquoting.

Multiple contributors to Victoria’s 2022 Property Market Review called for an overhaul of the statement of information document, among other reforms, including reserve prices to be disclosed before auction, free building and pest inspections be provided to prospective buyers, and agents to be banned from withholding sales prices.

The submissions were obtained via freedom of information laws as the Allan government has refused to publicly release the report it commissioned, which was set to consider if the laws governing the state’s property market, including underquoting, could be improved.

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