How to Sell Your House Privately in Queensland

Engage a solicitor or conveyancer the week you decide to sell. They prepare the contract, tell you precisely what must be disclosed for your title, and order the searches. In a community titles scheme they will also tell you which body corporate records you need, which can take weeks to obtain.

Owners who leave this until an offer arrives lose buyers. A motivated buyer who is told "give me a fortnight to get a contract drawn" goes and inspects something else on Saturday.

Queensland requires a seller to give the buyer a disclosure statement, with prescribed certificates and information attached, before the buyer signs the contract. It covers title details, encumbrances, rates, statutory notices and, for community titles, body corporate information.

Getting this wrong is not a paperwork problem. A non-compliant disclosure can hand the buyer a right to terminate, potentially after you have taken the property off the market for weeks.

Build a file of at least six settled sales from the last 90 days, same suburb, same property type. Adjust each one against your property and write down the reason for every adjustment in dollars. "Nicer than mine" is not an adjustment; "$25,000 better for a second car space and a north aspect" is.

Then look at what is currently listed, because that is what your buyer is also inspecting this weekend. Set your launch price at or slightly below the top of your evidenced range, and mind the round-number search brackets, $1,010,000 is invisible to every buyer filtering "up to $1,000,000".

Professional photography is the highest-return money in any campaign, private or otherwise. Buyers decide whether to inspect from a phone screen, and phone photos of your own living room lose to a professional shoot of the identical room every time.

Add a measured floor plan, it measurably increases enquiry on houses and townhouses, and write the copy for one specific buyer rather than listing features. A family chasing a school catchment and a renovator on the same street are two different sales pitches for the same house.

Owners cannot list on realestate.com.au or Domain. Both sell subscriptions only to licensed agencies, which is why every flat-fee "sell without an agent" service in Australia is itself a licensed agency.

The alternative is to go to buyers directly: paid search against the terms buyers use for your suburb and price band, paid social in front of local and interstate buyer audiences, retargeting for the people who looked once, and a dedicated page for the property to send all of it to. That reaches a different buyer than a portal does, the one who has not started searching portals yet.

Answer every enquiry within hours. Buyer interest decays fast and there is no database to fall back on. Register every person who attends an inspection, because that list is the entire asset the inspection produces if nobody offers on the day.

Take offers in writing with the deposit, finance position and settlement date, and compare on terms as well as price. An unconditional offer $10,000 lower is frequently the better one. Never disclose your minimum, and never conduct an inspection alone with an unverified stranger.

Once terms are agreed, your conveyancer prepares the contract and holds the deposit in their trust account, never your personal account. Queensland residential buyers then have a statutory cooling-off period, so a signed contract is not yet a completed sale.

From there it is coordination: building and pest access, finance dates, the final inspection and settlement. Keep every agreement in writing, particularly anything about repairs, because verbal agreements get remembered differently a fortnight later.